Somebody PLEASE tell me this is an April Fool's Day joke?

The following news article was just quoted in kallisti's blog: John Cotter, "Chaplain advises Wiccan soldiers," Edmunton Sun, 3/31/07. The dateline says 3/31, not 4/1. But I hope to the gods that this will turn out to have been an April Fool's Day joke in extraordinarily poor taste. Not that even retroactively admitting, or even falsely claiming, it was a hoax will save the thousands of lives this fuck-up will cost.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- From jokingly advising Wiccan soldiers to keep their clothes on when celebrating the spring equinox to coaxing troops to talk about the trauma of surviving a roadside bomb, Canadian Forces chaplains are in Afghanistan for everyone. ¶ Maj. Malcolm Berry smiles as he recalls being approached on the NATO base in Kandahar a few weeks ago by a group of soldiers of the Wiccan faith - a neo-pagan religion strongly tied to nature.

"They wanted to welcome the spring in a ceremony where they are very thankful to Mother Earth and the new moon with pagan prayers," said Berry, the senior chaplain for Task Force Afghanistan. ¶ "We had no difficulty with that. We just didn't want them to do it 'sky-clad' (naked) in this environment because it would be too dangerous." ¶ The six Wiccans - a Canadian and five Americans - were invited to hold their service outside the Christian fellowship centre. ¶ They were given water, candles and food that they were welcomed to eat inside the centre after the ceremony. ...

Jesus fuck a monkey.

It's good news if you're a Canadian Wiccan in Afghanistan, I grant. And it's part and parcel of what any properly supervised, properly educated military chaplain is required to do for the soldiers in his or her unit whether that chaplain is American or Canadian. But for the love of fucking god, who in the flaming hell's bright idea was it to talk to a mother fucking reporter about this?

Do I have to remind you that even the most secular and liberal Muslims agree that the Koran teaches the mandatory death penalty for polytheists and nature worshipers? And that, as such things go, the Islamic culture in Afghanistan isn't consistently even liberal enough (despite clear and unambiguous commands in the Koran) to tolerate other "people of the Book," fellow Abrahamic monotheists, Christians and Jews? If this article gets translated into the local languages and passed around inside Afghanistan, it's the next best thing to handing the Taliban two full battalions of reinforcements, right at the beginning of spring insurgency season, and in a year when the Americans are so over-extended in Iraq that we've got nobody left to send into Afghanistan if the local population turns hard against us. And that's true even if this turns out to be an April Fool's Day hoax.

Fucking Neopagans and Wiccans; I swear they don't have six brain cells among them in the whole god damned movement. They think it's so fucking obvious that what they have is so beautiful and sweet and so obviously true that it never for once, never in a million fucking years, ever occurs to one when to shut the fuck up about it. And that is exactly what whichever soldier it was who talked to a fucking reporter about this should have done instead, had a nice hot steaming cup of Shut The Fuck Up.

This pisses me off so badly I can't even see straight, and the language filters are shot completely to hell. I was already on the edge of boiling over about the war in Afghanistan already. The Emmy-winning docu-drama Flight 93 was on The History Channel tonight when I was flipping channels. It occurred to me early on that for a movie I'd been intending to see, wow, I'd made plenty of excuses not to get around to it. And you know what, it turned out that I was emotionally unprepared to be reminded just how personally I take the story of the heroes of United flight 93, how emotionally invested in it I am. But those men and women sacrificed their last 10 minutes of life, 10 more minutes they could have spent on the phone with their loved ones, to save ... well, frankly, to save an empty but highly symbolic building, since the Capitol had been evacuated by then. But more importantly, they died having the honor before all men and all holy gods of being the first of us to strike back at the bastards who did this. And all that rage boiled back up in me, alongside wracking pain of the guilt I was feeling over the sheer pornography of listening to re-enactments of those people's last phone calls to their families. All through it I was sobbing uncontrollably.

And over the last few minutes, in the background you could hear news announcers making three promises, from the Bush administration, that turned out to be total fucking lies: that the World Trade Center would be swiftly rebuilt, that we would strike back against the people who did this with overwhelming force, and that the people who planned this would be swiftly brought to justice. And all three were total fucking lies, and where oh gods where is the anger over this? Ground zero is still a hole in the ground, we sent 1/50th the guys into Afghanistan we should have sent, and Osama bin Laden probably spent this evening having a relaxing cup of coffee in a café in Karachi after an errand there before heading back to his comfortable offices in Waziristan or Northwest Territories, Pakistan. And now it's spring, and the re-armed and reinforced Taliban are pouring across the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan again, and in the middle of all of this we find fucking Neopagan Witches so fucking stupid and so fucking self-centered that even with their own asses in a sling, with Taliban cross-hairs hovering over their positions in the Taliban's old capital city, they have to brag to God and all the world about how they thumb their fucking noses at Afghanistan's laws.

And you know what I just don't fucking get? These are Canadian peace-keeping troops. I thought they were smarter than that. Yes, even the Neopagan Wiccan ones. The Canadian army sets the gold standard for peace-keeping. They were the first to set up an institute to study it scientifically and teach it as an elite military discipline. What the Canadians don't know about peacekeeping would fit in a thimble. I could calligraph everything they don't know about peacekeeping on my thumbnail using a Speedball C-3 point. Where in fuck did some reporter find Canadian peacekeepers this fucking dumb?

I haven't been this angry in years. I am literally half-blind with anger, tunnel-blind with rage. To quote codeb6, "I really should have taken that job slapping stupid people."