Human Events/Robert Spencer, 14 Jan 10: It’s official: political correctness prevented Fort Hood assassin Nidal Hasan’s Army superiors from acting upon signs of his incipient jihadist tendencies. AP reported Monday that “a Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan’s medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.”
Hasan rose to the rank of major even as he turned what was supposed to have been a lecture on psychiatry into a diatribe on the Koran’s punishments for unbelievers and doctrines of warfare against them. According to AP, “he gave a class presentation questioning whether the U.S.-led war on terror was actually a war on Islam. And students said he suggested that Shariah, or Islamic law, trumped the Constitution and he attempted to justify suicide bombings.” He rose through Army ranks even as he justified suicide bombing and spouted hatred for America while wearing its uniform.
His superiors and those around him noted his statements, and were worried about them. “Yet no one in Hasan’s chain of command,” reports AP, “appears to have challenged his eligibility to hold a secret security clearance even though they could have because the statements raised doubt about his loyalty to the United States.”
Why didn’t they? Because they knew what would happen if they did.
If Nidal Hasan had been removed from his position or even simply reprimanded and disciplined in the months or years before he massacred thirteen people in cold blood at Fort Hood, it isn’t hard to imagine what might have happened. Groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) would have been quick to charge the Army with “bigotry” and “anti-Muslim hatred.” The mainstream media would have embarked upon a full-bore witch hunt about the alleged witch hunt against Muslims in the military, interviewing the weeping mothers of Muslim soldiers killed in the line of duty while fighting for the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan. Army generals would have had to answer questions about alleged discrimination against Muslims in the military on the Sunday morning talk shows. And ultimately the President of the United States would order a special effort to make Muslims in the military feel at home and welcome.
Worse still, those who might have complained about Hasan would have faced public abuse, smearing by CAIR and MPAC as bigots, and possibly even disciplinary action from their superiors. Chris Matthews, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher would have subjected them to nationally broadcast ridicule. All Army personnel would have been ordered into sensitivity training, perhaps run by CAIR itself.
It isn’t hard at all to imagine such a scenario, because it has played out in real life more than once.
For years now CAIR, MPAC and other Islamic advocacy groups in the U.S. have done all they could to demonize everyone who speaks honestly about the threat of jihad and Islamic supremacism. Nor have they limited their attacks to public figures: CAIR was behind an effort in 2008 by six imams who were taken off a flight for acting suspiciously to sue the passengers who reported the imams to airline personnel. If their attempt had succeeded, Americans would be afraid to report suspicious behavior in airplanes for fear of being sued.
And even thought that effort failed, people are indeed afraid to speak up about Muslims behaving suspiciously. The cost is, for most, simply too high.
And so for CAIR, MPAC, and the rest, the Fort Hood massacre was in a very real sense a mission accomplished: “Islamophobia” was duly avoided. Nidal Hasan was not removed from his post, and no steps were taken to protect anyone else from him. All this cost was 13 dead and 38 wounded. And in response, General George Casey has said the loss of the Army’s “diversity” because of Hasan’s jihad would be worse than the murders themselves — indicating that the political correctness that got us into this fix is still with us, and still putting us all at risk.
PJTV: Bill Whittle goes to Washington, DC to investigate radical Islam’s influence over our government and access to our national security secrets. Two whistleblowers, formerly with the DOD and FBI, have the chilling details. Watch videos:
The Islamic Infiltration, Part 1: Inside Our Government, Armed With Our Secrets (PJTV)
The Islamic Infiltration, Part 2: From Influence to Insurrection (PJTV)
State Department/Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, speech given 13 Jan 10: . . . . Equally important, the events of Christmas day demonstrated that some of the understandings that underlay how we organized ourselves for counterterrorism needed updating. Other events in the latter half of 2009 have also underscored how some of our operating assumptions were no longer adequate. Let me name the most outstanding of these assumptions:
First, we know now that al-Qa’ida affiliates – not just the group’s core leadership in Pakistan – will indeed seek to carry out strikes against the U.S. homeland. We can no longer count on them to be focused exclusively on the near enemy – on the governments in their own countries. . . . .
. . . .Second, for years, we have known about al-Qa’ida’s desire to recruit militants with clean records to deploy against the United States. But we had not experienced any really eye-catching efforts to slip into the country in some time, leading some to speculate that the United States has successfully deterred such operatives from entering our borders. But as a number of recent events have made clear, we cannot afford to have any sense of false security. As we’ve seen in the last few months in two high-profile law-enforcement cases, individuals who appear to have been trained and handled from the badlands of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan have been operating within our borders. A bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, was trained in Pakistan and now faces charges in federal court for planning to set off a series of bombs in the United States. An indictment that was unsealed in Chicago in December portrays an American citizen–David Headley–allegedly playing a pivotal role in the 2008 attack in Mumbai, which killed more than 170 people and dramatically raised tensions in South Asia. . . .
. . . A third myth has also been dispelled: Americans are immune to al-Qa’ida’s ideology. . . .
Frontpage, 14 Jan 10: Any American who believes that radical Islam does not represent a clear and present danger to western civilization should be required to spend a month living under Sharia Law in a Muslim country. It would ultimately be a less expensive, and more lasting, means of energizing the nation than waiting for a terrorist to successfully complete the kind of mission of destruction that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab came so close to executing on Christmas day.
My first experience with Sharia Law occurred more than a decade ago, shortly after I had deplaned from the British Airways 777 that deposited me in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the course of a consulting project involving the Kingdom’s oil industry. Waiting to pass through customs, I observed a Saudi soldier swinging a machete, casually decapitating a score of Kewpie dolls that an unsuspecting westerner had tried to bring into the country. The torsos were returned to the traveler and the heads were dumped in the trash, all in accordance with Sharia Law. As a “how do you do?” there are better ways to make a first impression.
But Sharia Law prohibits any representation of the human form, and it is quite strict about depicting Allah’s other creations among the animal kingdom, as well. Fish seem to be exempt from this prohibition, for reasons that I still do not completely understand. In any case, Islam also assumes that portraying mythical creatures, from golden idols to Kewpie people, might tempt gullible believers away from the true path. Thus it is entirely logical – under Sharia Law – to separate the head of a Kewpie doll from its shoulders with extreme prejudice. . . . .
NPR, 14 Jan 10: Islamic extremist Web sites are full of commentary on two men viewed as heroes: the CIA suicide bomber and the Nigerian man suspected of trying to blow up a plane. Al-Qaida expert Jarret Brachman talks to Deborah Amos about jihadist activities on the Internet. Brachman describes who’s posting, and who’s reading such tributes on the Web.
