Ralph Peters, like a lot of us, wonders why the Muslim officer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood and wounded dozens more, was promoted to major, why his radicalism wasn't uncovered before he committed the crimes, and why this administration is so afraid to use the term "Islamic terrorism."
Government authorities have punctiliously avoided mention of the killer's religion and his associations with radical Islamists in the days following the massacre at Fort Hood. President Obama admonishes us not jump to conclusions, but this sounds a little strange coming from the man who had no trouble jumping to the conclusion that Professor "Skip" Gates was the victim of "stupid" racist cops in Cambridge Massachussetts last summer.
Imagine how quick everyone would be to "jump to conclusions" had a Christian walked into an abortion clinic shooting everyone in the place while shouting "Jesus is Lord." Would President Obama be urging us to withhold judgment about the killer's motivations until "all the facts were in"? If a fundamentalist pastor walked into a gay bar and opened fire would the media recoil from calling the man a domestic terrorist? Would the President say that the killer might have "just snapped," and that we shouldn't assume that the man's religion played a role? I very much doubt it.
There would, in fact, be no end of pontificating on the alleged deep current of misogyny, hatred and bigotry running through American Christianity, but Hasan, we must understand, was a Muslim so we must tread lightly so as not to smear the millions of good Muslims in this country. We must be careful not to assume that he was in fact acting on the same motives that inspire his co-religionists around the world to kill and maim whomever and whenever they can.
There was no reticence whatsoever among our political leaders last summer to portray angry retirees at town hall meetings as terrorists, but we dare not suggest that a Muslim mass murderer is a terrorist until every i is dotted and t crossed even if the man has just perpetrated a classic act of Islamic terrorism.
Of course we should not paint all Muslims as murderers, but we also need to realize that there are a billion Muslims around the world. If only 1% are radical extremists - a conservative figure, perhaps - that's 10 million people out there who are willing to die for the opportunity to kill you and your children. That's a startling number. It's even more startling to realize that there are millions more who, though not killers themselves, would delight to see you and your children blown to bits.
Anyway, Peters concludes that Hasan's victims were in fact victims not only of this looney Islamist, but also of an out-of-control political correctness that infects our political and military leadership as well as our media. Here's part of his column:
It gets worse: On Sunday evening, a ranking officer in Hasan's medical chain of command raced to cover her butt. Asked why the killer was promoted to major after receiving career-killer performance reviews at Walter Reed, the officer claimed that Hasan faced the same promotion board requirements as everyone else.
Liar, liar, uniform on fire: A dirty big secret in our Army has been that officers' promotion boards have quotas for minorities. We don't call them quotas, of course. But if a board doesn't hit the floor numbers, its results are held up until the list has been corrected. It's almost impossible for the Army's politically correct promotion system to pass over a Muslim physician.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the few lawmakers willing to whisper the word "terrorism," needs to call the officers who sat on Hasan's promotion board before the Senate, put them under oath, then ask if Hasan made major because of minority-quota requirements.
This corrupt (and now deadly) affirmative-action system does a severe disservice to the bulk of minority officers, who make the grade on quality and professionalism. It leaves other officers wondering if the new guy who just showed up in the unit is a "real" officer or an affirmative-action baby.
Ditto for our government's unwillingness to take on Muslim extremists on US soil. Blathering about freedom of religion, we foster hate speech. By protecting the fanatics, we betray the peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and communities.
Hasan gave ample evidence that he was unstable and sympathetic to jihad. If an officer of his rank had said the things about blacks or gays that Hasan said about Americans in general and military personnel in particular - He told a gathering of doctors (!), for instance, that infidels (non-Muslims) should all be beheaded and have hot oil poured down their throats - he would have rightly been busted in rank and maybe even drummed out of the service. But in our politically correct age we must pretend that certain people are not what they obviously are. See no evil, hear no evil is the word of the day when a Muslim says what anyone else would be cleaning latrines for saying. Welcome to the Brave New World of Orwellian progressivism.
RLC