Still In Denial About Ft. Hood

Today we celebrate Veterans Day in America.  Many other countries honor this day under the name of Remembrance Day, Poppy Day, or Armistice Day ever since November 11 was the day of the 1918 Armistice that ended the First World War.

World War One has to be one of the great turning points of history.  Though the American Civil War offered a taste of "total war," World War One was the first real demonstration of the bloodbath which could be achieved by multiple nations each totally committed, throughout society and with a modern industrial base, to killing the other side first.

The existence of wars serves a useful purpose: wars remind us that there is evil in the world, and that evil must be opposed.  To do that, though, first you have you identify it.  For all the countless masses slaughtered in the trenches of France, at least everybody knew who the enemy was: the guy on the other side of the line in a different uniform.

No longer.  For the very first time in American history, a commissioned officer of the United States military turned his gun against his fellow soldiers, while still in American uniform, in the service of our enemies.  U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 12 soldiers and one civilian on Fort Hood.

This was no random act of insanity.  Maj. Hasan had sat under the preaching of, and corresponded with, a jihad-preaching Muslim imam; that firebreathing cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, lauded last week's "heroic" murders:

He [Hasan] is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.  The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.

Hasan's neighbors reported him regularly walking around in traditional Muslim robes when not in his military uniform.  He was known to aggressively promote Islam to his patients and co-workers, causing discomfort and pain to others.  He had even given a formal presentation, complete with PowerPoint slides, to fellow army psychiatrists which apparently had to be heard to be believed:

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America's Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats... He also told colleagues at America's top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire.

If ever there was a man who considered himself to be "Muslim first and American second," Maj. Hasan was he.  If Internet reports are to be believed, he identified himself as a "Soldier of Allah" on his business card!

When he attacked people wearing the same uniform he did, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" in praise of his murderous religious obligation after that very morning telling a neighbor that "I'm going to do good work for God," one could hardly seek a more crystal-clear explanation for his actions: He was a devout Muslim who read his Koran and took seriously its many admonitions that perfidious unbelievers be slain wherever they can be found.

Or not.  Here's Newsweek's take:

What if Thursday's atrocious slaughter at Fort Hood only signals that the worst is yet to come? Soldiers and their families are living, and bending, under a harrowing and unrelenting stress that will not let up any time soon. And the U.S. military could well be reaching a breaking point as the president decides to send more troops into Afghanistan... The accusations against [Hasan] can't help but bring to mind the violence scarring military bases all over the country after the duration of two long, brutal wars.

Is that so?  Perhaps we need to call in the CDC to finally identify the contagious germ that causes PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) - because while countless thousands of American troops have served in violent combat and not returned to shoot the innocent, the murderer Hasan had never even been deployed overseas, much less been in combat.  Why would you send an expensively-trained psychiatrist into combat anyway?

Not to be outdone, we find Congresscritters calling for investigations into religious extremists:

I expect political hardball on any legislation as important as the health care bill.  I just didn't expect it from the United States Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Who elected them to Congress?

The role the bishops played in the pushing the Stupak amendment, which unfairly restricts access for low-income women to insurance coverage for abortions, was more than mere advocacy.  They seemed to dictate the finer points of the amendment, and managed to bully members of Congress to vote for added restrictions on a perfectly legal surgical procedure.  And this political effort was subsidized by taxpayers, since the Council enjoys tax-exempt status.

When I visit churches in my district, we are very careful to keep everything "non-political" to protect their tax-exempt status.  The IRS is less restrictive about church involvement in efforts to influence legislation than it is about involvement in campaigns and elections.  Given the political behavior of USCCB in this case, maybe it shouldn't be. [emphasis added]

 - Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Riiiight.  So people who don the uniform of America's defenders, yet swear allegiance to a creed dedicated to destroying America, its freedoms, traditions, and people, are not a problem to be investigated; but a religious group exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and redress of grievances in opposition to an law that they see as promoting the murder of the unborn, should come under the hammer of the IRS?

Our elites have been in denial about evil for a very long time.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn was booed at Harvard when he warned of "an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses" and a "tilt of freedom in the direction of evil ... evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent in human nature."

Many members of the Obama administration seem to share the view that there is no such thing as evil.  They not only believe that there's no such ting as evil, they've managed to convince a lot of people that it's politically incorrect to say that people who do evil are evil - and that their friends and fellow-believers are likely to be, too.  People back off from naming evildoers out of political correctness.

Unfortunately, political correctness kills people.  Army officers knew Hasan was a jihadi but did not dare to properly investigate the issue for fear of appearing to discriminate against Muslims.

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.

Another, Dr Val Finnell, who took a course with him in 2007 at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland, did complain about Hasan's "anti-American rants." He said: "The system is not doing what it's supposed to do. He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out. I really questioned his loyalty."

If an Army officer wore a Nazi uniform while off duty; gave presentations talking about how evil Jews were ruining the world and had to be killed; and shouted "Sieg Heil!" down the corridors, how long do you think he would be a free man?  His feet wouldn't even touch the ground before he landed in the deepest, darkest Federal prison cell that could be found for him, and rightly so.

Is it a bad thing to be discriminatory against Nazis?  For darn sure we should discriminate against them in every possible way.

Yet here we find America's honorable defenders, who risk their lives on our behalf all around the world, being forced to watch their backs right here at home because the Great and the Good don't want to offend one particular group of people whose holy book, most prominent leaders, and most noted preachers all want all of us dead.

When the Army Chief of Staff is more concerned about our army's diversity becoming a casualty than he is about his soldiers being murdered by a well-known group of people with readily-identifiable views, America needs to have its head examined - while we still have one, before somebody in the next mosque-pew down from Hasan chops it off as the Koran commands.

Honor our veterans: stop those who want to kill them, treating them as the traitors worthy of death that they are. Even the stupidest Col. Blimps of World War One knew that much.