Those crazy American citizens who stir up trouble overseas! The "Swimmer," aka John Yettaw, who got Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi into hot water with the country's dictators, apparently just wanted to give the (Buddhist) woman a (Christian) Bible. No wonder the US State Department publicly expressed its outrage over the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, while quietly sending consular officials to meet with the "missionary" in jail.
Embassies have to do that, even though the Amcit has single-handedly given the Burmese junta just what it needed to set back the cause of democracy in Myanmar (Burma) another few years. In some countries (think Mexico), the "arrest/detention of American citizens" requires a considerable investment of Embassy time. (Image: the US Consular service flag, State Department).
I remember being contacted by Egyptian security officials, who had arrested an American citizen on the steps of Alexandria University. Actually, the arrest was a way of saving him from physical harm, as he was intent on distributing Bibles to the students. Even though Egypt has a sizable Christian minority, they know better than to proselytize in the Muslim-majority country.
But in addition to these unofficial freelancers, the US has something far more dangerous: a cadre of people in the Pentagon and in the US military bent on spreading their Christian beliefs, at the point of a gun. In the Middle Ages, they called that the Crusades. That is the last thing that the US needs with thousands of troops surrounded by millions of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, religion is exactly what the region does not need more of.
Today Frank Rich of the New York Times gave readers a tip on an outrageous example of religious infiltration into the Rumsfeld Defense Department: a series of Powerpoint slides put up by GQ Magazine - cover sheets to the Secdef's daily Worldwide Intelligence Update for the President. "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith," intones Isaiah 26:2, superimposed on a pic of US tanks kicking up the Baghdad dust.
Think that's just some Powerpoint Ranger's innocent fiddling with pixels? Then read Jeff Sharlet's chilling article in the May Harper's, subtitled "The Crusade For a Christian Military." I refrain from writing the title, as I don't want search engines to pick out what incendiary stuff "the Faith Element" (a group of Special Forces in Iraq who thought the locals were ready for some Old Time Religion) liked to scrawl on their tanks.
Those consular officers in Burma might get the Swimming American out of jail and on a plane back home. But it's going to take a huge amount of diplomacy (and a strict secular line from our new administration to its armed forces) to undo the damage caused by the zealots of the previous lot.
Religion - keep it at home, and don't mix it up with defense or diplomacy.