RUTHFULLY YOURS

OWEGO — Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin’s first words to an audience of about 300 on Friday set the tone for the three-part lecture on current events and military history he will give this weekend at the Owego Treadway Inn.

“Do we have any Muslims in here?” he asked. “Who’s in here to cause trouble?”

Boykin’s talk on Friday was the first of his three-part discussion, “America and the Greatest Threat of our Time.” His lecture will continue with the second and third installments today at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. at the Owego Treadway Inn.

“I believe today we face as great a threat as we faced in 1776,” Boykin said. “The situation in America is much far more serious than most Americans realize, and there’s no longer any excuse for not knowing.”

That threat, he said, is Islam.

“You need to remember one thing from tonight’s presentation,” Boykin told the audience. “Their objective is to replace our Constitution with Sharia Law.”

Boykin spent 36 years in the Army, retiring as a lieutenant general in 2007. He was the U.S. undersecretary of defense for intelligence during part of the George W. Bush administration.

Boykin also was an original member of the Army’s elite special operations unit, Delta Force. He either commanded or served on Delta Force missions in Iran, Grenada, Columbia and Somalia.

He was the Army’s mission commander during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, depicted in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”

He said his experiences on these missions have led him to believe that Islam poses a threat to America.

“You need to understand that this is a war of ideology — it’s not a war of Islam versus Christianity,” Boykin said. “This is a war of Islam against everybody that is not submitted to Allah. Now because most of the world is Christian, it falls out that most of the people who are under persecution, or the targets of Islam, are Christians.”

Boykin said the way to solve what he considers the greatest threat of our times is to change the religious belief of Muslims.

“I have no resentment, no animosity towards them because I know that they’re living under a hall of darkness,” Boykin said, “and I know that the ultimate resolution to this is to take the gospel to them, to bring light to them.” [Good luck with that. I’m sure that he is deeply sincere, but ‘taking the Gospel to them’ isn’t going to happen; not EVER. They only understand and respect overwhelming force. Eventually, that’s how we’re going to have to ‘bring the light to them.’ The ‘light’ of true shock & awe. The notion of converting 1.3 billion sub-human inbreds to Christianity is dangerously naive.]