Army Reserve

Army Reserve training material: Evangelicals, Catholics are extremist groups « Hot Air

This one earns the coveted Duke University triple facepalm, the highest honor we can award for self-beclowning. An Army Reserve training class attempted to instruct soldiers on the various extremist groups of the world, dutifully noting al-”Quaeda,” with which the US armed forces are at war, and Hamas, which the State Department lists as a terrorist organization. Both of those, however, come below a couple of extremist groups so fringe that only about 60 million Americans count themselves among their ranks:

A later statement from the Pentagon said that the author of this slide presented this viewpoint without permission, and that the research left much to be desired:

“Not a subject matter expert”? No kidding, but that doesn’t explain everything. Why was he or she assigned to train reserves on extremism in the first place? Shouldn’t the lack of expertise prompted the Army Reserves to exercise more supervision over its instructor? Few organizations are as relentlessly hierarchical as the military, and someone in the chain of command appears to have acted … irresponsibly.

Or, as Mark Steyn points out, several someones:

One does have to be amused, however, at the last entry on the list —“Islamophobia”. That follows a half-dozen references to various Islamist groups, including one that the Obama administration is currently attempting to engage (the Muslim Brotherhood), and “Sunni Muslims” —without any other qualifiers. I imagine the Shi’ites appreciate that conclusion, but since there are over 1.6 billion Muslims around the world and Sunnis comprise 75%-90% of them (according to Pew), isn’t that inclusion “Islamophobia” in and of itself?

“Totally dumb” is letting everyone connected to this training seminar off too easily.