Once upon a time the Boy Scouts were about camping, backpacking, and canoeing. Boy Scouts were into high adventure and sporting activities. Scouts were about preventing forest fires and “Do a Good Turn Daily.” Scouts worked with the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. They cherished ideals such as the Cub Scout Promise and the Law of the Pack.

Now the Boy Scouts have a new mission — fighting terrorism, rounding up illegal aliens, search and destroying marijuana fields, and embracing the SWAT mentality.

“The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters,” reports the New York Times.

Homeland Security and the FBI are behind the effort to indoctrinate and train the Boy Scouts to become tomorrow’s Gestapo. “Our end goal is to create more agents,” April McKee, a senior Border Patrol agent, told the New York Times. “Before it was more about the basics,” said Johnny Longoria, a Border Patrol agent. “But now our emphasis is on terrorism, illegal entry, drugs and human smuggling.”

“Just as there are soccer moms, there are Explorers dads, who attend the competitions, man the hamburger grill and donate their land for the simulated marijuana field raids. In their training, the would-be law-enforcement officers do not mess around, as revealed at a recent competition on the state fairgrounds here, where a Ferris wheel sat next to the police cars set up for a felony investigation,” Jennifer Steinhauer writes for the Times.

Scouts are trained to identify the enemy. In a competition in Arizona, one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. “If we’re looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy in Imperial County, California, “then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don’t know, would you call that politically incorrect?”

Politically correct or not, Homeland Security and the FBI realize Arabs are not the enemy — “rightwing extremists” are.