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"Three days later … we got him. We brought him back into our base there and we had a Sea Land container set up to hold prisoners in, and I said put him in there. They put him in there, there was one guard with him. I said search him, they searched him, and then I walked in with no one in there but the guard, and I looked at him and said, 'Are you Osman Atto?' And he said 'Yes.' And I said, 'Mr. Atto, you underestimated our God.'"

Okay, there's some confusion about the word "our" there, but is the comment really that noteworthy? When the Council on American-Islamic Relations called the comment ill-informed and bigoted, were they saying that Atto's God really is their Allah? Isn't their usual line that terrorists like Atto aren't true Muslims?

That this has made the news in so many outlets (The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, Voice of America, BBC, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, others) is surprising, but far more predictable are the comments of liberal and Muslim pundits.

"Everyone is entitled to their own religious beliefs, no matter how ill-informed or bigoted, but those beliefs should not be allowed to color important decisions that need to be made in the war on terrorism," CAIR executive director Nihad Awad told the Times. "Gen. Boykin should be reassigned to a position in which he will not be able to harm our nation's image or interests."

Likewise, said Interfaith Alliance head Welton Gaddy, "The remarks of Gen. Boykin fly in the face of the pleas of the president and violate the basic principles of tolerance and inclusion that are implicit in the culture of this nation."

U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "I urge you to reassign or reprimand him; we cannot afford to have such an extremist speaking on behalf of our nation and our military."

Here's the shocker: some newspaper editorial pages went much further than even Awad, Gaddy, and Conyers, calling not for his reassignment, but for a full discharge. The San Francisco Examiner called for a denial of his right to free speech.

"As a citizen of this country, Boykin has every right not only to hold this opinion, but to try to persuade others to hold it, too," said an editorial. "But … as a soldier—and an officer—his words and actions become the concern of the entire American public. … There is no right for an officer in uniformed service of his country to proclaim which religions are good and which are bad."

The Examiner compared Boykin's comments to those of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who told Muslim leaders, "The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

The paper said that Boykin's comments, "while somewhat less obviously inflammatory, nonetheless were deplorable because of who said them and when."

The Los Angeles Times, editorializing on Boykin a day after Arkin slammed him on the op-ed page, drew an even closer connection with Mohamad. "The two men perceive the world in similar terms. One sees a perfidious plot against Asian and Islamic values; the other … appears to believe that the entire Islamic world is America's enemy." (This, one day after its news page reported, "In his public remarks, Boykin has also said that radical Muslims who resort to terrorism are not representative of the Islamic faith.")

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October (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47