Thanks for bringing attention to this story. How appalling to use a place of worship, even a staged one, as a target in an exercise of this kind. I’d actually never heard about the Boeing ad, either, and I think you’re exactly right to put the two stories together. I imagine the kind of outrage that would occur if they had set up a fake church for this purpose, and I have to wonder if there has been any kind of community outcry (other than the posted comments on the website).

I fail to see the controversy here. Ask anyone who conducts hands on training in any profession. If you want the most effective results, you have to train under realistic conditions and for the most likely scenario. What should the Illinois first responders have used as a setting — an Amish barn raising?

It’s no great secret some mosques in the US, Great Britain, and Europe are used by militant Islamists as jihadi recruiting centers. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Thailand, and elsewhere, mosques have been used to store weaponry and as bases for military operations.(Islamist militants do this deliberately even though it’s a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions and other established rules of warfare. They know Westerners are hesitant to attack places of worship.) In the 1940’s, Grumman and Douglas Aircraft, along with other manufacturers in the defense industry, featured images of their products in action over Japan and Europe. That may have torqued off the Japanese and Nazis, but so what? It’s unfortunate, but the fact is we’re fighting a war on several fronts in regions that just happen to have a lot of Muslims. An ad depicting soldiers rappelling onto a Swiss chalet would have been silly.

Go_Fish, would you feel differently about it if, for example, they had created a Branch Davidian scenario? An isolated, ultra-right wing, nominally christian group of separatists who were armed to the teeth?

hs, I wouldn’t have been upset had they chosen a “Davidian” style excercise. Go-Fish is correct, as is history and current news, nationally and internationally, concerning Islam’s usage of Mosques for military use, counter-national training (ie, terrorism) and weapons staging/storage.

Islamic terrorism is still more of a concern and larger threat than situations such as Ruby Ridge or the Branch Davidians. I believe we’re going to get attacked again, and it’s not going to be like 9-11, it’s going to be similar to Beslan, but on a national scale… and it will be quite interesting to see the networks once everything comes to light.

I find the “realistic conditions” argument specious. You don’t need to call the setting a “mosque” (or “cult” or “church” or anything else religious for that matter) to provide a realistic setting for law enforcement to run through their drill. If you notice, all the “suspects” in the photo are your prototypical fair-skinned, middle-class, Midwestern-valued folks. Somehow the law enforcement professionals there were still able to run the drill even without “them” looking like your prototypical radical Islamist terrorists.

As far as where our most likely “threat” will come from, I’d like to see some evidence cited. As long as our local authorities are biasing their training against one particular threat, the logic - and its accompanying political rhetoric - become circular.

Travis: I agree with you. The purpose of these exercises is to identify the things that work and the ones that don’t. Yes, they have to create a scenario that has some realism. The could just as easily have set up what is probably a more likely one: a couple of high school students armed to the teeth who are shooting up the school.

“…would you feel differently about it if, for example, they had created a Branch Davidian scenario? An isolated, ultra-right wing, nominally christian group of separatists who were armed to the teeth?”

Not really, although you would have to wonder why. AFAIK, there have only been a couple incidents of violence involving similar groups over the past 30 or so years. The Jim Jones cult that started in California and ended in mass suicide in Guyana in 1978; the quasi-religious, Afrocentric group MOVE whose Philadelphia headquarters were destroyed in a horrible fire after a standoff with police in 1985, and of course the infamous Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas in 1993. The stereotype of ultra-fundamentalist, militant Christian groups made good newspaper copy and hyperbolic TV reports a decade or so ago, but we know today that was almost entirely fiction.

It can be argued that angry high school and college students are a more direct threat than any particular group of religious nuts, but school shooting like those at Columbine, Jonesboro Arkansas, Pearl Mississippi, Virginia Tech, and Northern Illinois Univ were not hostage situations or sieges. The response to incidents like thosee require completely different tactics. Contrast them however, with the massacre of 336 people, including over 180 children, by militant non-Episcopalians in Beslan, Russia.

What the Illinois law and security agencies were focusing on is the increasingly more frequent use of mosques and Islamic study centers by radical non-Buddhists as cover for illegal activities. Locations in the US where this has been both suspected and confirmed include Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Albany and Brooklyn, NY, Portland Oregon, Texas, Seattle, Florida, and California.

I suppose one could have just as easily placed the mock raid setting at South City parish fish fry or monthly book club meeting at the Reformed temple. That wouldn’t have been at all controversial, would it?

It would have been more realistic for Illinois to have said it was a stronghold of the local meth militia.