I believe in being respectful of others beliefs and culture is the right thing to do. However, there are situations where you are just not going to please everyone, try this strategy and you are doomed. There are just too many extremists of all shapes, colors and sizes to please them all. Sometimes is just comes down to using a little common sense.

The situation that developed recently with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) getting upset about Navy SEALs shooting at Middle Eastern dressed targets is just ridiculous.

“Using a Muslim woman wearing a religious head scarf with [verses from the] Quran behind her as a target for our nation’s military personnel is offensive and sends a negative and counterproductive message to trainees and to the Muslim-majority nations to which they may be deployed,” wrote CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad in a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

The targets in question are used by the SEALs and Special Operations community, and reality based training is a must. I say again, we have to train for reality based scenarios and there have been plenty of women (insert religion of choice) shooting at US Warfighters.  I’ve also seen and personally used targets that have children holding guns and explosives to simulate real scenarios that are encountered globally and on a daily basis. It’s unfortunate, just read “On Killing” to realize why we must use real pictures of human beings to shoot at.

In my career we ran into a similar situation briefly with shooting non caucasian targets in the kill house.  We ended not pulling them out of the inventory because we had leadership who applied common sense. After all, in Spec Ops we don’t discriminate who we shoot in the face for practice and it should stay this way.