Nuts [Mark Steyn]
For the purposes of argument, let's accept the media's insistence that Major Hasan is a lone crazy.
So who's nuttier?
The guy who gives a lecture to other military doctors in which he says non-Muslims should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats?
Or the guys who say "Hey, let's have this fellow counsel our traumatized veterans and then promote him to major and put him on a Homeland Security panel?
Or the Army Chief of Staff who thinks the priority should be to celebrate diversity, even unto death?
Or the Secretary of Homeland 
Or the president who says we cannot "fully know" why Major Hasan did what he did, so why trouble ourselves any further?
Or the columnist who, when a man hands out copies of the
Or his media colleagues who put Americans in the same position as East Germans twenty years ago of having to get hold of a foreign newspaper to find out what's going on?
General Casey has a point: An army that lets you check either the "home team" or "enemy" box according to taste is certainly diverse. But the logic in the remarks of Secretary Napolitano and others is that the real problem is that most Americans are knuckledragging bigots just waiting to go bananas. As Melanie Phillips wrote in her book Londonistan:
Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.
To the injury of November 5, we add the insults of American officialdom and their poodle media. In a nutshell:
The real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6526030/Fort-Hood-gunman-had-told-US-military-colleagues-that-infidels-should-have-their-throats-cut.html
Fort Hood gunman had told US military colleagues that infidels should have their throats cut
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. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.
Colleagues had expected a discussion on a medical issue but were instead given an extremist interpretation of the Koran, which Hasan appeared to believe
It was the latest in a series of "red flags" about his state of mind that have emerged since the massacre at Fort Hood, America's largest military installation, on Thursday.
Hasan, armed with two handguns including a semi-automatic pistol, walked into a processing centre for soldiers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he killed 13 and injured more than 30.
Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a "Muslim first and American second."
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."
Selena Coppa, an activist for Iraq Veterans Against the War, said: "This man was a psychiatrist and was working with other psychiatrists every day and they failed to notice how deeply disturbed someone right in their midst was."
One of Hasan's neighbours described how on the day of the massacre, about 9am, he gave her a Koran and told her: "I'm going to do good work for God" before leaving for the base.
[more]
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/1870633,CST-NWS-stein08.article
Before you generalize about the major
See? This rampage by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan who shot dead 13 people at Texas's Fort Hood Army base Thursday, confirms everything I've been saying all along -- psychiatrists are dangerous, unbalanced individuals; they go into the profession seeking the mental help that they themselves need . . .
Scratch that. Bad joke. But of course, Hasan does represent another suspect group in our society -- Virginians. Edgar Allan Poe was from Virginia. Shirley MacLaine, too. They're not stable people . . .
No one is suggesting that, maybe because the bias against psychiatrists is more of a mild suspicion, and general dislike of Virginians began to ebb after 1865.
But Hasan is also a Muslim, and people who would laugh off the psychiatrist/Virginia slurs view that aspect differently, because it scratches a shameful itch.
"We should seal the borders!" said a friend of mine, someone I generally respect when he isn't saying stuff like that.
"Tell me," I challenged him "how the actions of this Muslim American indicts all Muslim Americans?"
He sputtered, and I went on.
"If a lady murders her kids and says that Jesus told her to do it, does that indict all Christians? All ladies?"
I've said this before, but it bears repeating. There are two false logic threads that define racism. The details don't matter, you can plug in anything.
The first is extrapolating from the specific to the general. You meet someone from the Netherlands and they need a shower. You therefore conclude the Dutch are a dirty people. That's racism.
The other is to go from the general to the specific. You meet a guy from Iceland, and you automatically pat your wallet, because your dad taught you that Icelanders are thieves. That's also racism.
The killings at Fort Hood might say something about the strain that overtaxed U.S. soldiers are under. It might say something about security on Army bases. But if you think that it says something about religion, what you're really doing is saying something about yourself, and it isn't something good.
We don't do that kind of thing
Here's another example.
A few days before the Fort Hood massacre, one of my depressingly regular correspondents sent in the following brief, taunting e-mail:
"What, no comment on the Richmond rape? No thoughts on the richness that the perps add?"
The first sentence refers to the vicious gang rape of a 15-year-old girl two weeks ago after a high school dance in California. The second refers to my oft-stated opinion that, rather than ruining the country, as bigots claim, Hispanic immigration enriches it.
I've learned long ago that it's not my job to argue with everyone who can type an e-mail. Don't bother trying to teach a pig Latin, the saying goes: it only frustrates you and upsets the pig.
But the attitude of that message -- See what these people do? -- screams for reply. He doesn't mean high school students or Californians. He means Hispanics. Sometimes you have to answer.
I wrote back:
"One of the keys of being a racist is to hold other groups accountable for things you dismiss in your own group. The crimes committed by whites don't undermine your status, so why should crimes committed by Hispanics undermine theirs? Oh right, because you hate them already. Thanks for writing."
Assuming the Fort Hood murders are an act of extremism and not a symptom of mental illness -- it can be hard to tell -- then what could the killer possibly have hoped to accomplish?
Well, an American soldier of Islamic extraction committing such an atrocity will be seen by some as supporting the notion -- embraced by both fundamentalists and bigots, ironically -- that Muslims are somehow not part of the American story, that they don't belong in the U.S. Army. That they don't belong here.
There are Americans -- many, I would guess -- who draw that conclusion, oblivious that they are doing exactly the thing that the terrorists, knowingly or not, want them to do. Highlighting our differences, embracing sectarianism, strife, disharmony, jihad.
So how does the patriotic American try to thwart negative results of such a crime? Only one way, obviously, by rebutting the fundamentalist message, by reaffirming that America is an open tent to all who would come and peacefully accept our values, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that lone unbalanced individuals who do barbaric things do not sweepingly indict their co-religionists, even if thinking they do feeds into our comfortable prejudices.
Especially if thinking they do feeds into our comfortable prejudices.
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Why do we have to read British papers to get Ft. Hood jihadist news?!
The London Telegraph has the bombshell report on Ft. Hood jihadist Nidal Hassan’s ties to the September 11 terrorists.
Read and re-read here for the full investigative piece.
Allahpundit has a full round-up and commentary on the Telegraph’s revelations here.
Question: Why is it that we have to read British papers to get the unvarnished truths about the Ft. Hood Muslim mass murderer?
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Asra Nomani reports on “Hasan’s hidden militancy.” Well, it wasn’t that hidden:
The alleged Fort Hood gunman had revealed a hard-line Islamist streak to acquaintances in the Muslim Community Center that he made his mosque. The Daily Beast’s Asra Q. Nomani reports.
Not long ago, inside the quiet library of the Muslim Community Center here in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., Golam Akhter, a local Bangladeshi-American civil engineer, 67, got into a fierce debate with a young Muslim doctor over how to interpret the concept of “jihad” within Islam. Akhter argued, “Jihad means an inner struggle, fighting against corruption and injustice.”
The young doctor responded. “That’s not a correct interpretation. Jihad means holy war. When your religion isn’t safe, you have to fight for it. If someone attacks you, you must fight them. That is jihad. You can kill someone who is harming you.”
Doug Giles says “We need an ask and tell policy for jihadists in the military.”
Yes, yes we do.
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