MULTICULTURALISM WAS THE TRUE KILLER AT FORT HOOD
By Avi Davis

Pundits, commentators, newscasters and our political class are all looking for the clues:  Who and what caused Major Nidal Malik Hasan to launch a deadly attack on his fellow soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas last week  resulting in the massacre of 14, including the life of an unborn baby?

Take your pick of the reasons:

• Hasan was bridling with indignation that the United States was carrying out military operations against fellow Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Hasan cracked under the strain of dealing with trauma victims returning from overseas duty.
• Hasan was inflamed by the prejudicial treatment he had received from his colleagues and superiors.
• Hasan was infuriated that the army would not allow practicing Muslim servicemen to become conscientious objectors before shipping  them out to countries where they would be forced to shoot and  kill their co-religionists
• Hasan was the latest example of America’s love affair with guns and its fatal ambivalence in policing them.
• Hasan was simply a very disturbed individual who had exhibited paranoid, anti-social behavior at numerous times during his military career

Such reasons seem to echo the same motivations our chattering classes once ascribed to another famous killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, viz: the killer was driven by personal issues which had nothing to do with his adoption of  a hateful ideology or contempt for America and its values.

But the truth is now becoming stunningly clear.  Hasan was a confirmed jihadist, his values and ideals tied directly to the same ideology which resulted in 3,000 deaths in America on a sunny morning in September, 2001 and has been the catalyst for 14,327 individual terrorist incidents worldwide since that date.

Even at this early stage of the investigation, his emails, recorded conversations and own writings provide conclusive proof that he considered suicide bombings, the premeditated mass killings of innocents and fatal attacks against United States civilians and  military personnel as justified acts of homicide. He was deeply influenced in these views by the preachings of an imam, Anwar al-Alwaki, who, according to the 9/11 Commission, was the spiritual guide to two of the 9/11 hijackers in a San Diego mosque.  Hasan had also attended the Dar al-Hirjah mosque in Falls Church, Virgina where al-Awlaki once preached. In the month before the massacre Hasan had exchanged 10-20 emails with the imam who is now believed living in exile in Yemen. 
 
On the day following the Ft. Hood massacre, on his website,  al-Awlaki praised Hasan as a true Muslim warrior, as "a hero" and "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."

How long will it take for our cognoscenti  to connect these dots? 

Perhaps we should indeed be moving beyond an examination of Hasan’s motivations, which are clear and incontrovertible, to asking ourselves these far more relevant questions: 

Why was a man of Hasan’s temperament and ideology not properly vetted before being accepted into the U.S. Army?  

Why was no one willing to pay heed to the warning signs of an impending catastrophe?

 Why is the media working so assiduously to obscure the true motivations for his crime?

The answer to the first question is that since 9/11, the U.S. military  has been under increasing pressure to embrace diversity as a governing principle for recruitment.  Military advertisements, in a range of communities, suggest that cultural affinities and religious observance are respected in the U.S. army while accommodations are made for particular aspects of appearance.  It should be no surprise then that the November 9th edition of Army Times carries a front page story headlined – Regs Make Way for Religion – Sikh, Muslim Allowed To Incorporate Customs Into Army Dress.

The story details how Captain  Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi, a practicing Sikh, was granted permission on October 22  to wear a beard and a turban with his uniform.   The decision stands in stark contrast to a 1986 Supreme Court decision (Goldman vs Weinberger), where the Court upheld a proscription on Jews wearing yarmulkes while in uniform. 

With the army displaying such giddy obeisance to diversity and multicultural sensitivities, is it any wonder that its own Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey, in the wake of the massacres, proclaimed that, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Given such hand wringing over the necessities to produce a  true “multicultural” army, it seems fairly clear that Nidal Malik Hasan was accepted into the armed forces and then rose to the rank of major, despite his dubious associations and anti-American beliefs, because he was a Muslim.  The inescapable conclusion is that the army feels it must have Muslims within its ranks in order to prove it has no beef with Islam and that this over rides the suitability of  practicing Muslim recruits for actual army service.

The answer to the second question is even more troubling.

Hasan’s penchant for spouting anti-American rhetoric and for declaiming on the essential justice of a jihadist campaign was well known to his superiors and the FBI.   But as a Fox News report, investigators were loathe to launch an investigation of the  email trail which led from Hasan to Anwar al-Alwaki  for fear of being “ crucified” in the breach of the Major Hasan’s First Amendment rights.

But what of  Hasan’s superiors, who certainly knew of his beliefs and ideological commitments?  In 2007, as a recruit, he made a power point presentation at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C. where he underlined Muslim grievances against the U.S. and supported the Jihadist justification for attacks on U.S. military personnel.  You would think that this would offer some cause for alarm. Yet no one  spoke up or complained about these outrageous views emanating from the mouth of a U.S. army officer, even though one colleague expressed reservations about “sharing a foxhole” with the man.

Why was no one willing to expose this ticking time bomb within their midst?   For the same reason the FBI resisted the urge to build a more comprehensive file on Hasan:  he is  a Muslim, and therefore, as a defamed and persecuted minority within the United States, a case to be handled with delicacy.  

The evidence unfortunately grows that multicultural sensitivities will often trump security interests, even when the lives of American citizens are directly threatened. 

Finally we come to the media.
The New York Times, in an editorial on November 6, declared that:  "It is unclear what might have motivated Major Hasan.  He seems to have been influenced by a mixture of political, religious and psychological factors.”
It followed a day later with a story suggesting  that Hasan was driven crazy by the stress of his job as a psychiatrist.

CNN’s Chris Matthews , in an interview on November 11 with Nihad Awad, a representative of  the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), focused not on the motivations for the crime but on whether Muslims in America should fear a wave of reprisals as revenge for the shootings. In the course of the interview the two men seemed to agree that we may never discover the true motivations for the killings.  
 
And here’s a doozy from The Guardian’s Michael Tomasky:
“ The fact that Hasan reportedly shouted the Allahu Akaba is meant, I suppose, to imply that he was an extremist fanatic. I'm not sure that it does. My understanding is that it's something Arab people often shout before doing something or other.”

The fact that suicide jihadists are regularly recorded as intoning these words before committing murder and that two flight recorders from the four planes which crashed on 9/11 have the hijackers murmuring them repeatedly, seems to say nothing to Tomasky and others like him.

Why?  Why such a cognitive suspension of  one’s own powers of analysis and deduction? 

 Why such an apparent inability to parse wishful thinking from reality?

Because the members of our media are loathe to present us anything as starkly black and white as good and evil, prefering an infinitely more comfortable grey zone where no reader or listener need  be railroaded into judgement or moral distinctions.

Yet it is this murky grey zone which provides the intellectual fodder for multicultural sensitivites and cultural acceptance of deviant, asocial behavior.  It also happens to be the same swamp from which  Jihadists fish for their claims of moral equivalence  and the materials from which their protective social dome is constructed.

Expressions of Islamic extremism go unchecked in our society because no one seems  willing to trip  the wires of multicultural correctness.  Despite the events of 9/11, despite the thousands of  terrorist attacks and murders around the world which have drawn their inspiration from the Koran and Islam, our society  - from our government, to our houses  of learning to our armed forces, insists on subscribing to an utter falsehood that religion plays no role whatosever in these attacks.   Instead  they hew to multicultural tropes which deaden our acceptance of the truth.

A jihadist ideologue may well have pulled the trigger that ended 14 lives last week.  But it was multiculturalism and its inveterate partner ‘diversity’  which opened the gate and  allowed him entry  into our lives.   

We should all be questioning how much further we can allow that gate to swing open.  We should all be wondering, if the gate is to remain even a  little ajar, what barriers will exist to  prevent further expressions of hatred, acts of incitement and the perpetration of wanton, indiscriminate murder.

The Western Word - An International Weekly Digest   11-13-2009