The outpouring of compassion for mass murderer, US Army major Hasan in the United States is nauseating. We have to add quickly that we hope the sentiments percolating and bubbling forth in the media represent only the liberal-academic-media complex and have little to do with what the nation actually thinks.
The national farce that is being played out tops anything Monty Python ever managed. The moral bankruptcy has come from President Obama down; it has been repeated and mouthed by top officials in his administration, such as Janet Napolitano, who when recently addressing an audience of Muslims hastened to assure them that she stands ready to defend Muslims against a backlash.
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. Homeland Security secretary says she is working to prevent a possible wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas.The US administration and the liberal-academic-media elite are resembling Basil Fawlty more and more with each passing hour. "Above all, do not mention the 't-word' " is the order of the day. It is political correctness gone mad--but as Charles Krauthammer observed, political correctness is not just a stupid and bankrupt ideology, it also ends up actually hurting human beings--as the bereaved families of the thirteen murdered soldiers at Fort Hood can testify.
Janet Napolitano says her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any backlash against American Muslims following Thursday's rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The shootings left 13 people dead and 29 wounded.
Napolitano was in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday for talks with security officials and a meeting with women university students in Abu Dhabi.
Meanwhile the evidence mounts that Hasan's murders and attempted murders were motivated by Islamic belief and nothing else. It was a genuinely home grown terrorist act upon American home soil--which is why Napolitano is probably wanting to blameshift by rewriting her job description to become the Department for Homeland Protection of minorities. Everyone else will have to fend for themselves. Our advice: dismantle the whole "Homeland Security" bureaucratic monster. It was a stupid idea to begin with: President Bush had it one hundred percent wrong. Creating another layer bureaucracy to monitor existing bureaucratic agencies might assuage the guilt of politicians, but it will never work. It is an abject costly failure.
The dereliction of duty of the top US army general, General George Jones, has been breathtaking. He has been more concerned to pander to Islamic feelings than he is to take responsibility for the deaths of thirteen of his soldiers--which happened on his watch, evidently because of incompetence and holes and irresponsibility and PC sensitivities on the part of his officers in his army at his orders.
Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal's Editorial Board expresses her disgust at the faux compassion for mass murderer, Major Hasan.
Dr. Phil and the Fort Hood Killer
His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
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.
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