'Going Muslim'
America after Fort Hood
Tunku Varadarajan
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/08/fort-hood-nidal-malik-hasan-muslims-opinions-columnists-tunku-varadarajan.html

"Going postal" is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker--archetypically a postal worker--"snaps" and guns down his colleagues.

As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub--disconcertingly--"Going Muslim." This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American--a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood--discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

The difference between "going postal," in the conventional sense, and "going Muslim," in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological "snapping" point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage--the camouflage of integration--in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of "harassment" as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not "snap" in the "postal" manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away--to a neighbor--a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious "departure."

We are a civilized society. One of our cardinal rules of coexistence is that we (try always to) judge people only by their actions and not by their identity, whether racial, religious or sexual. This is our great strength as a society, and also, in the present circumstances, our great weakness: How to address the threat posed by the fact that, of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in our midst, there are a few (perhaps many more than a few) who are so radicalized that they would kill their fellow Americans? Must we continue to be neutral in handling all people from different groups even though we know that there are differential risks posed by people of one group? The problem here is a heightened version of the airport security problem, where we check all people--including Chinese grandmothers--regardless of risk profiles. But can we afford that on a grand, national scale? (And I mean that question not merely in a financial sense, but also in terms of the price we'd pay in failing to detect a threat in time.)

This being America, we will insist on going a long way to preserve the appearance of equality, and that is no bad thing in terms of moral principle. But like all values, the appearance of equality is not infinite in its appeal--especially if it flies in the face of common sense and self-preservation. A short time after the shootings at Fort Hood, President Obama asked us not to jump to conclusions. To many Americans, this was a grating request, of a piece with the political correctness that was responsible--it has emerged--for the hands-off treatment by the Army of Maj. Hasan. How else could he have been left in the position of treating U.S. troops, given the stories we've now heard about his incendiary statements and apparent incompetence?

This is the same mindset that led the FBI to deny the possibility that the Fort Hood massacre was linked to terrorism even before they could have had any idea that was the case. We don't have to be paranoid about Arab males; we just have to avoid the opposite: Being fearful of coming across as Islamophobic, and thereby failing to look straight at a situation.

This is part of a larger--and too-hot-to-touch--American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse. Muslims may be more extreme because their religion is founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes. President Obama was as craven as a community college diversity vice-president when he said that no one should jump to conclusions. Everyone did, and he lost credibility with people who cannot stand civic piety in the face of the murderous kind.

Muslims are the most difficult "incomers" in the ongoing integration challenge, which America has always handled with pride--and a kind of swagger. We're the salad bowl/melting pot. Drive through Queens to see how we do this.

America differentiates itself on integration from Western European countries, which are far more cringing and guilt-driven in their approach. But can the American swagger persist if many Americans come genuinely to view Muslims as Fifth Columnists? The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant's desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. Once that trust doesn't exist, America faces a problem in need of urgent resolution.

Have we reached that point of breakdown in trust? Not yet, I think, and not by some distance; but a few more murderous incidents of the Maj. Hasan variety--a few more shouts of "Allahu Akbar" as Americans are shot dead--will push many Americans on to a dangerous cusp.

I will end on a practical note. The PC--political correctness--problem is an obvious and thorny issue that the U.S. Army, at least, has to tackle. The Army had a self-identified Islamic fundamentalist in its midst, blogging about suicide bombings and telling everyone he hated the Army's mission; and yet, they did, or could do, nothing about it. In effect, the "don't-jump-to-conclusions" mentality was underway long before this man killed his colleagues.

So, first, it should be part of the mandatory duty of every member of the armed forces to report any remarks or behavior of fellow service members that could be construed as indicating unfitness for duty for any reason.

Second, there should be a duty to report such data up the chain of command, regardless of the assessment of the local commander.

Third, there should be a single high-level Pentagon or army department that follows all such cases in real time, whether the potential ground for alarm is sympathy with white supremacism, radical Islamism, endorsement of suicide bombing or simple mental unfitness.

Let the first lesson of the Hasan atrocity be this: The U.S. Army has to be a PC-free zone. Our democracy and our way of life depend on it.

Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at NYU's Stern Business School and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, is executive editor for opinions at Forbes.


Dr. Phil and the Fort Hood Killer
His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass
By Dorothy Rabinowitz
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525831785724114.html

It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice.

The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace. Commentators, reporters, psychologists and, indeed, army spokesmen continue to warn portentously, "We don't yet know the motive for the shootings."

What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.

One of the first outbreaks of these fevers, the night of the shootings, featured television's star psychologist, Dr. Phil, who was outraged when fellow panelist and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff observed that he had been listening to a lot of psychobabble and evasions about Maj. Hasan's motives.

A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan's Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes?

It was the same case to be presented, in varying forms, by guest psychologists, the media, and a representative or two from the military, for days on end.

The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked us to consider, "how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act." And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan's proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous.

To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred—the sort of mindset that regularly eludes the Dr. Phils of our world as the motive for mass murder of this kind.

As the meditations on Maj. Hasan's motives rolled on, "fear of deployment" has served as a major theme—one announced as fact in the headline for the New York Times's front-page story: "Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment." The authority for this intelligence? The perpetrator's cousin. No story could have better suited that newspaper's ongoing preoccupation with the theme of madness in our fighting men, and the deadly horrors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, than this story of a victim of war pressures gone berserk. The one fly in the ointment—Maj. Hasan had of course seen no war, and no combat.

Still, with a bit of stretching, adherents of Maj. Hasan-as-war-victim theme found a substitute of sorts—namely the fears allegedly provoked in him by his exposure, as an army psychiatrist, to the stories of men who had been deployed. The thesis then: Maj. Hasan's mental stress, provoked by the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could. Let's try putting that one before a jury.

By Sunday morning, Gen. George Casey Jr., Army chief of staff, confronted questions put to him by ABC's George Stephanopolous—among them the matter of the complaints about Maj. Hasan's anti-American tirades that were made by fellow students in military classes, as well as other danger signs ignored by officials when they were reported, apparently for fear of offense to a Muslim member of the military.

These were speculations, Gen. Casey repeatedly cautioned. We need to be very careful, he explained, "We are a very diverse army." Mr. Stephanopolous then helpfully summarized matters: This case then was either a case of premeditated terror—or the man just snapped.

The general was not about to address such questions. He was there to recite the required pieties, and describe the military priorities . . . which are, it appears, a concern above all for the sensitivities of a diverse army, a concern so great as to render even the mention of salient facts out of order, as "speculation.'" "This terrible event," Gen. Casey noted, "would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty."

To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.


After the Fort Hood Massacre
Sorting the Hasans from patriotic Muslims in the U.S. military
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525743684356798.html

There are two irreconcilable views of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan's murder of 13 people last Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas. One is that Major Hasan should be seen as not much different than many other disturbed individuals, whose demons pitch them into homicidal frenzies. The other is that the Hasan murders raise hard questions about the ability of Muslims to serve at all in the American military.

Neither view is acceptable. It will be the job of public and military officials in weeks ahead to shape a policy response that recognizes the hard political and ethnic realities of the Fort Hood massacre.

The central reality is that 13 people are dead on American soil, all but one in service to the country as a member of the U.S. Army. Sergeant Amy Kreuger of Kiel, Wisconsin, enlisted explicitly in response to 9/11, she said, to oppose the forces that caused that day. These appear to be the same violent forces that turned Major Hasan into an instrument of terror.

So no, Major Hasan is not just another nut. He volunteered himself into a larger Islamic jihad, whose political weapon of choice is the murder of innocents across the globe.

The Fort Hood massacre makes clear, again, that Islamic terror is unavoidably a domestic U.S. problem as well. There is a strain in American thinking that deludes itself in believing that somehow this force will occupy itself mainly with blowing up marketplaces in faraway Pakistan or Afghanistan. On Thursday, their problem was our problem.

In the aftermath of these shootings, the best venue for exploring the domestic threat from radical Islam and what to do about it is Senator Joe Lieberman's proposed hearings into the Hasan murders. News reports piecing together Major Hasan's history suggest an association years ago with a pro-al Qaeda imam at a mosque in northern Virginia. That imam left for Yemen in 2002, and his lectures there in support of al Qaeda have appeared on the computers of terrorists suspects in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Investigators are collecting information from Major Hasan's PC and his email traffic, with officials already noting that he spent time surfing radical Islamic Web sites. This sounds similar in some respects to the aborted car bombings in the U.K. in 2007, committed by Muslim doctors there who also spent evenings absorbing violent exhortations on Web sites. A Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty study that year documented the reach and sophistication of radical jihadi media on the Web—accessible to anyone with an Internet hook-up in Kabul, Islamabad, London or Fort Hood.

Before the Democrats came to power in the 2008 elections, one issue they pushed hardest through the policy debate was their opposition to domestic electronic surveillance in pursuit of Islamic terror activities. If the Hasan investigation concludes that he arrived at his pre-spree cry of "God is great!" after immersion in the world of violent Islamic Web sites and prior time spent at radical domestic U.S. mosques, then we would hope that the response of our lawmakers would be more than a shrug that these 13 dead are simply the price we have to pay for living in "our system."

Likewise, Mr. Lieberman's hearings could explore if the Army needs ways to muster out personnel such as Hasan or recruits ambivalent about fighting fellow Muslims.

Just as Americans can't blink away the dangerous world of radical Islam, however, we also cannot pretend that we can field a military that doesn't include Muslims. The unreality of attempting to fight this enemy without Muslim soldiers or operatives should be obvious. In Iraq, devout Muslims worked loyally as translators and guides for U.S. forces, sometimes dying to rid their country of the world's common enemy, which is homicidal Islamic fanatics.

In recent years U.S. soldiers have fought a common enemy on behalf of and often alongside Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, and elsewhere. The U.S. is fighting a sworn enemy today, just as in World War II American Germans, Italians and Japanese fought sworn U.S. enemies of the same race and religion. Many American Muslims will do the same if we stay focused on the real enemy, and show we have the will to do what's necessary to find them and stop them.


Fort Hood: Let's Drop the Political Correctness
By David Warren
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/09/fort_hood_99072.html

For a person with old-fashioned values, and an old-fashioned sense of English word meanings, the reports of the Fort Hood massacre were almost as provoking as what happened there. In the larger view of things, they may be more consequential.

Let me make that latter point plain. I am saying the words and attitudes conveyed in the reporting of a massacre can be, and in this case are, more consequential than the massacre itself.

Having said that, I must not leave the impression I think little of the loss of a dozen human beings, the perhaps permanent maiming of many more, and all the consequences of this horror in the lives of their families and friends. But we must not shed crocodile tears. My heart goes out to the victims, but from a great distance: I know none of them personally, I know no one who knows them.

This is my first objection to the "funeral of Diana" rhetoric we keep getting today, promptly from all affected politicians, whenever something bad happens and people get killed. The knowledge that their "touching remarks" are drafted by hard-bitten speechwriting staff, skilled in the professional emulation of human feeling, is something the public should bear constantly in mind.

But let us not only blame bureaucrats for the people who commission their work. President Barack Obama's display on Thursday made my point more clearly than it usually can be made, for he turned on a dime. He assumed the "presidential grieving tone" over the Fort Hood massacre, the moment after he'd just done an equally scripted segment of light joking banter for the benefit of the Tribal Nations Conference he was addressing. Millions in the television audience must have watched this incredibly cynical "quick flip." I wonder how many noticed it?

We should not allow ourselves to be moved by the cold hearts of professional tear-jerkers because when we reward that kind of thing we help perpetuate an emotional order that is dangerously false. We should instead be annoyed by attempts to manipulate us.

Falsehood has more consequences than the revelation of personal insincerity. What happened at Fort Hood was no kind of "tragedy." It was a criminal act, of the terrorist sort, performed by a man acting upon known Islamist motives. To present the perpetrator himself as a kind of "victim" -- a man emotionally distressed by his impending assignment to Afghanistan or Iraq -- is to misrepresent the reality.

This man was a professional psychiatrist, assigned to help soldiers cope with traumas. Is this the profile of a man with no control over his own emotions? It appears he had hired a lawyer to get him out of the military before his deployment overseas. Is this consistent with spontaneity?

He reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before opening fire on American soldiers. Would that perhaps offer a little hint of the actual motive? He shot about 40 people, over 10 minutes, with two pistols, neither of them military issue. Might that perhaps suggest premeditation?

There were reports from within the base (Fox News as usual seized on what other networks didn't), that accused Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had not merely been making anti-war remarks about Iraq and Afghanistan, but adding things like, "Muslims should stand up against the aggressor." Do we still have a category for treason? He has been quoted from Internet postings comparing Islamist suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade. Another clue?

And all this is quite apart from less checkable information that was quickly available through the Internet, painting a much grimmer figure of a man with openly Islamist views, able to rise through the U.S. military, because of the syndrome of political correctness. Time is certainly required to sort through such reports, and separate wheat from chaff, but the initial information alone was inconsistent with the media's clichéd presentation of the "tragedy of a man in despair."

This deadly enemy of the West -- the Islamist ideology which holds all Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims, and a considerable number of Muslims, too, to be human filth in need of extermination -- is well infiltrated. Events like that at Fort Hood prove this, and from what I can see, the problem can only grow with the passage of time.

Getting at Islamist cells, to say nothing of lone, self-appointed jihadis within our society, means getting over the false sentimentality that turns a terrorist incident into an "incomprehensible tragedy" when it is not incomprehensible, and not a theatrical event.

It also means ripping through the politically-correct drivel that is put in the way of investigators. They should surely be allowed to assume that every loyal Muslim will be eager to give information to help them identify any potential killers in their midst.

We'd be better off confronting that Islamist enemy, than spraying perfume after each fatal strike.


Fog Of War
Obama's muddled message at Fort Hood
Claudia Rosett
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/11/obama-terrorism-fort-hood-jihad-opinions-columnists-claudia-rosett.html

There's been plenty of debate about President Barack Obama's omission of the word "terrorism" when he spoke Tuesday at Fort Hood to honor the 13 Americans shot to death and dozens wounded last week by a Muslim army psychiatrist, Nidal Hasan. More broadly troubling to my mind is a word that Obama did use: "incomprehensible."

It came high in the speech. Having at least conceded that "This is a time of war" (instead of "overseas contingency operations"), Obama went on to note:

"These Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great state and the heart of this great American community. This is the fact that makes the tragedy even more painful, even more incomprehensible."

That might be language appropriate for a private conversation with the bereaved, whose interests may well center on the unfathomable ways of death and loss. But Obama was not holding a private conversation. Onstage at Fort Hood, he was speaking not only to the immediate survivors, but to the nation.

In that context, the death dealt out on a routine day, in deepest America, by the hand of someone yelling "Allahu Akbar," is not only comprehensible, but a predictable feature of this war against the United States. We may not know exactly where or on which day the next attack will occur, or with what weapons. But this is a war of many dimensions, in which ideas preached in one part of the globe can translate swiftly into murder--more aptly known as terrorism--in another.

The modern world is not neatly partitioned into far-off fields of battle and secure, unreachable America. To some extent it never was, though the enemies of yore were more prone to at least declare themselves by wearing enemy uniforms. Thus did the British burn the White House in 1814, and the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. But any remaining doubts about the global reach of modern battle should have been entirely removed on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as ash blanketed lower Manhattan and the Pentagon burned.

If that truth seems too obvious to bear repeating, then why, at a freighted emotional moment, in a speech watched by the world, does it elude the president of the United States?

The main lesson centers not on Hasan, but on the ease with which Hasan--born here in America--came into contact with the jihadi milieu. It is now emerging that from the comfort of his home turf, Hasan was in touch by e-mail with a terrorist-recruiting imam in Yemen, Anwar al Awlaki, who in turn has been part of a terrorist web extending from plots to attack Fort Dix, in New Jersey, to the Canadian parliament and prime minister. The same imam turns up in the 9/11 Commission report, his name transliterated there as Anwar Aulaqi, based eight years ago at the Dar al Hijra mosque in Falls Church, Va., where two of the Sept. 11 hijackers dropped by in spring 2001.

This is just a small sample of the reach and mobility of murderous jihadi networks in today's hi-tech world. And the hell of it is, they learn from each other. It's a good bet that while Americans are delving into how the military might have stopped Hasan in time, America's enemies are studying this bloody episode to understand how they can inspire more. Whatever Hasan's actual motivations--whether chemically unbalanced delusions, or cold calculation--the results are clear. It's another good bet that clips and articles on Hasan's kill rate at Fort Hood will play worldwide among the jihadi set as recruiting materials.

President Bush understood this, and during his first term pushed the frontlines of this war back from New York, Washington and skies over Pennsylvania to the home turf of America's enemies. He toppled two of America's most aggressive and brutal foes--Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the al-Qaida-hosting Taliban in Afghanistan. He cowed and harassed their despotic brethren with his push to promote their worst nightmare: freedom for their own people. Conclude what you like about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, or lack of; the record shows that for the duration of Bush's gunslinger presidency, America itself did not suffer the further massive terrorist onslaughts so widely feared in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.

But what now? During his campaign, Obama advertised himself as a citizen of the world, underscoring that claim with a speech before Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, as well as a visit to Afghanistan. But once in office, he has remained fastidiously distant in various ways from the world's real hot spots. In his rhetoric and deeds, he has distanced himself from the mass protests in Iran. As president, he has yet to go to Afghanistan--where Americans under his command are dying for their country. Having turned the site of the Berlin Wall into a campaign backdrop, he decided to skip a return trip to Berlin this Monday to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the actual fall of the wall. (See "Twenty Years Without The Wall.")

Now comes Obama's formulation that the deaths at Fort Hood make no sense because they did not come on "a foreign field of battle." This sounds oddly quaint in an age when the battles more than ever before are global and involve a war of ideas, which enemies of America have already projected into the heart of a slew of American communities. To be sure, near the end of his speech Obama--as he is wont to do--then said the opposite of his opening remark, mentioning "a world of threats that know no borders." That does not erase the garble with which he began.

In the media, the question of the hour is how the military could have missed the warning signs of Hasan's impending attack. Such details are important, and it would be a great idea to have better mechanisms (or any mechanisms at all?) within the military to catch the warning signs and act in time. But vigilance of that kind starts at the top. Right now the biggest warning sign of all is a president who looks at a pattern of jihadi communications, recruiting and attacks on America, and tells the public that the bloodshed at Fort Hood is "incomprehensible." Not for the first time, the system is blinking red.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.


Explaining Away Mass Murder
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/13/medicalizing_mass_murder_99142.html

WASHINGTON -- What a surprise -- that someone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" (the "God is great" jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan's religious beliefs.

"I cringe that he's a Muslim. ... I think he's probably just a nut case," said Newsweek's Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time's Joe Klein decried "odious attempts by Jewish extremists ... to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." While none could match Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

They suffered. He listened. He snapped.

Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?

And what about civilian psychiatrists -- not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics -- who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?

It's been decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.

But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.

And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won't find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as "compassion fatigue." The poor man -- pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.

Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It's a danger, clear and present.

Consider the Army's treatment of Hasan's previous behavior. NPR's Daniel Zwerdling interviewed a Hasan colleague at Walter Reed about a hair-raising Grand Rounds that Hasan had apparently given. Grand Rounds are the most serious academic event at a teaching hospital -- attending physicians, residents and students gather for a lecture on an instructive case history or therapeutic finding.

I've been to dozens of these. In fact, I gave one myself on post-traumatic retrograde amnesia -- as you can see, these lectures are fairly technical. Not Hasan's. His was an hour-long disquisition on what he called the Koranic view of military service, jihad and war. It included an allegedly authoritative elaboration of the punishments visited upon nonbelievers -- consignment to hell, decapitation, having hot oil poured down your throat. This "really freaked a lot of doctors out," reported NPR.

Nor was this the only incident. "The psychiatrist," reported Zwerdling, "said that he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway saying: Do you think he's a terrorist, or is he just weird?"

Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague's religion?

One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, The New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.

What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn't cry "Allahu Akbar" as they squeezed the trigger.

The delicacy about the religion in question -- condescending, politically correct and deadly -- is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: "Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center."

Ah yes, those Jersey men -- so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.


Analyzing Major Nidal Hassan
Man under excess stress or a murderous jihadi?
Melik Kaylan
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/12/major-nidal-hassan-fort-hood-muslim-opinions-columnists-melik-kaylan.html

Some commentators place Major Nidal Hassan's outrage at Fort Hood in the continuum of nonreligious psychotic mass killings like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. Others liken it to Islamist terror outrages such as suicide and car bombings. Those on the left seem to favor the former view, while those on the right prefer the latter.

The New York Times has agonized serially over the pressure on psychiatrists and Muslims in the Army. Conversely, Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal has argued that Major Hasan's motives needed no elaborate explication of that kind--he was a murderous jihadi. Furthermore, she and others noted that rampant political correctness prevented superiors from identifying Hasan as a threat even after they knew of his pleas to Al Qaeda contacts.

In most Muslim countries, the military would not dither over the issue. In Turkey, for example, the armed forces impose a strictly secular ethos on their personnel. Over the years, scores of stealthy Islamists have been identified and unceremoniously booted out for trying to proselytize fellow soldiers and generally undermine the army's values. In less-forgiving countries like Syria, such offenders tend to disappear without a trace or get funneled clandestinely into terror cells for missions abroad.

In places like Algeria, Egypt and Libya, Muslim officers watch over their Muslim conscripts with relentless scrutiny lest any unscripted forms of freelance worship sneak into the picture. Their prisons are full of Muslim Brotherhood conspirators undergoing torture--if they haven't already disappeared into secret graves. In Saddam's military, turbulent believers often went straight to the frontlines during the Iran-Iraq war. Others found that their views rebounded onto the limbs and lives of family members in the most palpable of ways.

Many Muslims desperately flee these countries for the West in order to pursue their more extreme brand of Islam. We give them the freedom to do so--in effect the freedom to hate us. Whether Major Hasan's enormity derived from jihadist motives or because he snapped under emotional strain, he clearly acted out of religious feelings on that day, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" as he shot his fellow soldiers. The New York Times cannot claim that Muslims suffer unbearable prejudice in the Army and then claim that Major Hasan's conduct had no link to his being a Muslim. There's the rub: Does the Army have any propaganda courses at officer level? Was anyone tasked with the job of telling Major Hasan what life might be like for him in a Muslim military? He would not have stayed around, or alive, long enough to explore his hurt feelings as a Muslim.

At Fort Hood and beyond, a great many soldiers are angry that superiors knew of the Major's Islamist rumblings yet refrained from intervening. That kind of probing intervention was, ironically, the job of a psychiatrist. In the Army, as in civilian life, we take infinite care to be inclusive, to allay the disaffections of minorities. We do not ask them why their families are here of all places.This is especially true of the U.S. military, an institution as color-blind, meritocratic and humane as no other genuinely fighting force in the world.

Perhaps Major Hasan felt that the Muslim world would not be so divided if it weren't for the interference of the West and Israel. In that case, the Army should have offered courses in the history of Islam to clarify the matter. Muslims fought against one another, martyring the Prophet's kin, in civil wars over control of the Caliphate soon after the religion was established. That's how the Shiite-Sunni split first arose, and it hasn't stopped since. This is not to say that all Muslims of all nationalities have an equal and natural predisposition to violence. But to the degree that they derive identity from the unreconstructed, unreformed Islamic narrative of self, they tend to have an Us-versus-Them worldview–in which other Muslims frequently become the "other."

If the Army is too sensitive to take the argument to Muslims in its ranks, we cannot lay blame there. The U.S. as a whole and the West in general do not ask Muslims or any other minorities to cast doubt on the virtues of their own culture. For many that would be tantamount to "hate speech." But as the conflicts of the world have migrated into the U.S. and its armed forces, the conflicts of ideas have become a part of our daily lives. Our strength--our appeal for the disaffected--lies in our tradition of open debate. For those minorities less accustomed to such openness, criticism can seem like a species of bigotry or a kind of culture war. To them we must say, repeatedly, that they are lucky to hear the sounds of such debate. Where they come from, too often, it would be settled in exactly the manner in which Major Hasan chose, only he would not have lived long enough to carry it out.


Blaming the Army for Hasan’s Terrorism
Is the military really to blame for this development, or are politicians the culprits?
by J. Robert Smith
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/blaming-the-army-for-hasans-terrorism/

Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s deadly terrorist attack last week at Fort Hood is generating plenty of finger pointing at the military for the debacle. While the indignation is understandable, and while the army brass bears a share of the responsibility for Hasan’s terrorism, having the military bear a disproportionate share of the criticism is both unfair and misguided. Doing so plays right into the hands of liberals, who would rather have America’s warriors take the heat.

A good deal of conservative ire has been leveled at the military for adopting political correctness codes. But is the military really to blame for this development, or are the culprits the politicians to whom the military brass reports?

The Constitution makes the military subordinate to civilian command. That’s more than just form, thank goodness. The military obeys the president and follows the laws established by Congress. The Founders wanted the military subordinate to civilian command, for obvious reasons.

Liberals have had great success over the years insinuating political correctness into the very fabric of the national government. They’ve accomplished this not only by using the law and directives or manipulating budgets, but with substantial acts of intimidation.Those who oppose quotas of any sort, for instance, or who make reasonable arguments against special laws and penalties for so-called hate crimes, are vilified as bigots.

The same goes for the military, with the glaring proviso that the president and Congress hold the military’s purse strings entirely. They also have the power to promote or demote, to advance or ruin careers. They run the show.

Given Washington’s de jure and de facto control over the military, it’s no small wonder that Hasan was able to remain in the army and move up the ladder despite giving every indication that his first loyalty lay with the aims of radical Islam.

Again, that’s not to let the army brass off the hook. Regardless of Washington’s legal and practical power, there are moral and ethical imperatives. If officers need to shout it from the rooftops that a fellow officer is hostile to his own nation and, in fact, is a militant for the nation’s enemy, then that must happen, whatever the fallout is to funding or careers. When there are reasonable suspicions that innocent human beings are imperiled — and that was most likely the case given Hasan’s public utterances — then action is unavoidable.

Most of us work in situations that require varying degrees of conformity. We all, to one extent or another, bend to the norms of our work cultures. That’s natural and expected. Organizations simply cannot function if its members are free-wheeling.

That is especially true for each branch of the military. The nation’s armed forces contain highly integrated units with strong hierarchies. Success in war depends on units acting internally, and with other units, as one.

The great ongoing tension in the military, or in any culture, for that matter, is between conformity and the duty to one’s conscience. Conscience should always prevail, but anyone who has faced having to make a choice between conformity and conscience knows it can be  wrenching. And a choice isn’t always going to be as evident as in the case of Major Hasan.

In the aftermath of the Hasan attack, the military’s top brass needs to reiterate to soldiers that doing the right thing — following the dictates of conscience — is a soldier’s overriding duty. It’s in the spirit of a soldier’s code of conduct — specifically, Article VI. It needs to be made obvious, given the current climate and until the infection of political correctness is removed from the armed forces.

And if that raises the president’s hackles or those of congressional members or cabinet secretaries, so be it. Call it the armed forces’ first act of reclaiming the moral high ground. And as Lincoln said about the possible fallout in his stand on principle: “Let the grass grow where it may.”

If the nation doesn’t want a repeat of Fort Hood or other terrorists shooting up malls or neighborhood schools, then a sustained, unapologetic, no-holds-barred campaign needs to be mounted against the authors and defenders of political correctness. It needs to begin with the national government. Certainly, liberals will resort to every nasty epithet and smear they can think of to push back the forces of common sense. They’ll arm-twist and threaten, connive and cajole, but whatever their gambits, they need to be defeated. The nation’s security depends on it.

Liberals would like nothing better than for criticism of the military in the Hasan affair to grow. For liberals, the military is a smart diversion from their own culpability in making the nation less safe through the odious doctrines of political correctness.