From Bosnia to Iraq, this evangelical Christian leader has long seen military battlefields as his personal mission field.
Most likely responding to a storm of criticism, Franklin Graham's evangelical Christian group
Samaritan's Purse softened language on its Web site about planned operations in Iraq.
"As American and allied troops roll into Iraq, Samaritan's Purse has a well-equipped team already on the ground in the Middle East ready to help thousands of suffering families in the name of Jesus Christ," a statement on the group's Web site read last week.
This week: "As war continues in Iraq, Samaritan's Purse has a well-equipped team already on the ground in the Middle East ready to help thousands of suffering families."
Just because Samaritan's Purse dropped language about American troops and Jesus Christ, don't think that Graham is packing his bags and heading home to North Carolina.
Graham and his Samaritan's Purse organization have a record of exploiting wars and preying on victims for their own missionary ends.
So, is Franklin Graham a spiritual carpetbagger and war profiteer who trades in souls?
Like the
Yankee Carpetbaggers who flocked to the South for political or financial advantage after the Civil War, Graham plans to go to Iraq in the wake of the current war to win Muslim souls.
Like the despised Carpetbaggers of yore, Graham plans to exploit the humanitarian crisis using tactics that smack of coercion, by subjecting vulnerable Iraqis to his Faustian
Christ-for-food program.
Graham, who has called Islam "a wicked religion", views the US military and its wars in the Muslim world as the perfect vehicles for missionary work in the difficult "
10/40 Window". The 10/40 Window is evangelical Christian-speak for the rectangle with boundaries of latitudes 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator; encompassing most of the Muslim World.
From Bosnia to Iraq, the evangelical Christian leader and his missionaries have long seen military battlefields as their personal mission field. They rode with IDF convoys into Lebanon during Israel's 1982 invasion to reach Palestinian refugees, preached pretentiously to Kurds fleeing Saddam's forces in 1991 and sheltered and proselytized young Bosnian Muslim girls who had been raped by Orthodox Christian Serbs.
A thought that struck Graham in the Spring of 1991 shortly before the Kurds were betrayed by America and slaughtered in droves by Saddam's military is telling:
"What a time to preach the gospel to these people! America is number one with them right now. They're eager to listen to anything we have to say!"
Graham and his group have repeatedly used the heightened vulnerability that war brings to target those in uniform, POWs, refugees, and civilians with physical assistance and "spiritual ammunition."
"I think we need to do all we can to use [the US military] presence," Graham urged his followers during the 1990 Operation Desert Shield, "to share with the people of that region the faith that our nation was built on."
During the Persian Gulf military build-up in 1990 and ensuing war in 1991, Graham made creative use of "embedded" fundamentalist Christian sympathizers in the chaplain corps, officer corps, and rank and file.
Under the Cover of Operation Dear Abby, in which the advice columnist urged Americans to write letters of encouragement to anonymous soldiers, Graham's followers mailed over 200,000 Arabic-language Christian tracts to US troops based in Saudi Arabia.
"Let them know you are praying that God will protect them," Graham instructed participants in his grassroots letter-writing campaign to send Christian tracts to Saudi Arabia. "Subtly drop the hint that while they are in Saudi Arabia, they may have an opportunity to share it with someone."
In December 1990, Graham followed with a bolder campaign. His
Samaritan's Purse organization helped send over 30,000 holiday gift packages to men and women in uniform that included a New Testament in Arabic.
Graham was later "touched most deeply" by a letter from an A-10 Thunderbolt "tank-killer" pilot. "Just two weeks earlier I had been trying to kill those guys," the pilot told Graham. "Then I found myself in an army hospital talking with an Iraqi POW. I gave him the Arabic New Testament."
Graham's activities had attracted the attention of the Saudis and US General Norman Schwartzkopf, who ordered a military chaplain to confiscate all of Graham's Bibles and tracts and return them. Disturbingly, the chaplain later confided in Graham that he and others largely ignored "Stormin' Norman" Schwartzkopf's orders. Instead, the Saudi-based chaplain brazenly requested Graham send more Arabic-language Bibles because he had befriended a "believer who has organized a distribution system for the tracts and the New Testaments."
In the current war in Iraq, an evangelical Christian chaplain has been using coercive Graham-style tactics at Camp Bushmaster near Najaf. Army 5th Corps chaplain Josh Llano, apparently exploiting a water shortage which has forced soldiers to go without bathing, has used a 500-gallon pool of clean, cool water under his control to gain converts.
"It's simple," Llano told a Knight-Ridder reporter. "They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized."
Meanwhile, back at the Pentagon, the latest word is that Franklin Graham has been invited to lead Good Friday Prayers, despite the objections of some in the Chaplains Corps. Poised to exploit war-weary Iraqis, Franklin Graham is more than ready for a Carpetbagging crusade, neatly dovetailing with the messianic militarist zeitgeist.
