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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

PC Blindness

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

Religion Had Nothing to Do with It

IowaHawk puts together a tongue-in-cheek montage spoofing liberal media analysis of the Fort Hood murders. The Left has been blaming everything for this act of terrorism except the most obvious thing - Nidal Hasan's belief that it was his religious duty to kill infidel soldiers.

American liberals seem to possess the peculiar characteristic of being able to look at the sky at noon on a clear day without seeing the sun.

RLC

Slings and Arrows

Uh, oh. Now he's done it. The President gave an otherwise unremarkable speech yesterday at Fort Hood to memorialize the victims of the latest act of Islamic terrorism on our soil, but his speech contained some unfortunate theological allusions which, we've come to learn, is a no-no for American presidents. Mr. Obama actually averred that no just and loving God would condone what Nidal Hasan did in the name of Allah and that the Muslim murderer of thirteen servicemen and women would pay a terrible price for his crime in the afterlife.

What was Mr. Obama thinking? You can bet that he's going to hear about that from the secular left. Editorials will be popping up like overnight mushrooms on op-ed pages across this great secularized continent chastising the President for this unconscionable breach of the wall of separation between church and state. Commentators on the major networks, as well as CNN and MSNBC, will soon be upbraiding him for an inappropriate, unwarranted, and flagrantly unconstitutional injection of religion into our public discourse. As President, Mr. Obama should not be using his office to give support to sectarian dogmas, he'll be admonished, especially those no graduate of Harvard Law School could possibly sincerely believe.

Yes sir, he is about to feel the heat. I know this because that's exactly what happened to President Bush every time he made even the most innocuous religious reference. Once he was asked, in what seemed like a mean-spirited attempt to make him look simple-minded, who his favorite philosopher was. One could almost hear the chortles wafting from the media elites who assumed that Bush couldn't even spell "philosopher" let alone name one, but when he answered "Jesus Christ, because he changed my life," it was as if someone had thrown a snake into the primate cage at the zoo. It drove our secular sachems into a frenzy to hear someone who had risen to such prominence as had Mr. Bush actually affirm something so déclassé.

So, now it's Mr. Obama's turn to play General Custer to our secular Indians. I haven't seen any arrows launched at him just yet, but I bet they'll start flying by tomorrow. It's going to look like that scene in the movie 300 where the Persians shot so many darts at the Spartans that they darkened the sky. Mr. Obama is really in for it now.

Why do you look so skeptical? They did it to Bush, didn't they?

RLC