PrintNovember 13, 2009
Twisted and Nuts
Listening to government leaders and media avoid any connection between Islamist terrorism and the murderous attack at Ft. Hood is, to use their terminology, about as "twisted" and "nuts" as it gets.
Example: President Barack Obama told mourners at Ft. Hood memorial service that we are at "war":
This is a time of war. And yet these Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great American community. It is this fact that makes the tragedy even more painful and even more incomprehensible.It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice - in this world, and the next.These are trying times for our country. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis. In Iraq, we are working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.Here, at Fort Hood, we pay tribute to thirteen men and women who were not able to escape the horror of war, even in the comfort of home.
When I heard him say "war," I thought it was just another teleprompter glitch, but he said it again. It was kind of like seeing the second plane hit the World Trade Center -- no accident here.
Next, will "Overseas Contingency Operation" be booted and replaced by the unspeakable "T-word"? Don't bet on it.
Okay, our orator in chief at least admits we are at war, but he can't seem to connect the clues between the shooter and the "war":
- Obama admitted twice that we are at "war."
- He implied that religion was a motivating factor of the alleged shooter.
- He conceded that "the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America."
Maybe we need an updated version of Clue. How long does it take to identify the terrorist with the guns in the readiness center?
Obama failed to deduce the whole from the sum of the parts he identified at the memorial and the conclusion he drew in his radio address last Saturday: "This past Thursday, on a clear Texas afternoon, an Army psychiatrist walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center and began shooting his fellow soldiers."
The White House must be out of the loop. Apparently Obama didn't hear the part about the psychiatrist being Muslim. Where's Obama's concern about his statement causing a backlash against psychiatrists generally and offending a great profession?
What is "twisted" is ignoring what Hasan believed and taught from the Quran to his fellow physicians at Walter Reed Hospital. One of them told Fox News: "He was a lightning rod. He made his views known and he was very vocal; he had extremely radical jihadist views." Despite the fact that high-ranking officers heard Hasan, they didn't report him because "they were too concerned about being politically correct."
Then there's the "nut" factor. These are the government and media whiz-bangs who feel competent to diagnose an individual who takes the Quran seriously, but are incompetent to spot terrorism.
Bob Schieffer, chief nut expert and host of CBS's "Sunday's Face the Nation," babbled that "Islam doesn't have a majority -- or the Christian religion has its full, you know, full helping of nuts too."
His guest, Sen. Lindsay Graham, agreed, and after lecturing the rest of us not to overreact, Graham then jumped to this crank conclusion. "It's certainly not about his religion, Islam. It's not about the army; it's not about the war. At the end of the day, I think it's going to be about him."
Yelling "Allahu Akbar" before killing soldiers isn't about his religion? Accusing the army of waging war against Islam isn't about the army? Objecting to the war isn't about the war?
Sen. Dick Durbin from Chicagoland added to the anti-reality frenzy: "How did it happen ... we must remain thoughtful and reserve judgment."
The clueless Durbin is the thoughtless military-basher who had to apologize for comparing our guards at Guantanamo Bay to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others."
One thing we can conclude from Durbin and the Schieffer/Graham interview is that the media and the Senate have their share of mixed nuts.
Then there's the FBI, which concluded in 2008 that Hasan didn't pose a terrorist threat, despite his contacts with "a Yemen-based militant Islamist prayer leader who had ties to Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers."
Here's the FBI's profile of the lone individual terrorist threat. If Hasan doesn't fit the profile, who does?
One particularly insidious concern that touches all forms of domestic extremism is the lone offender -- a single individual driven to hateful attacks based on a particular set of beliefs without a larger group's knowledge or support. In some cases, these lone offenders may have tried to join a group but were kicked out for being too radical or simply left the group because they felt it wasn't extreme or violent enough. We believe most domestic attacks are carried out by lone offenders to promote their own grievances and agendas.
FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress in 2007 that "[t]he diversity of homegrown extremists and the direct knowledge they have of the United States makes the threat they pose potentially very serious. The radicalization of U.S. Muslim converts is of particular concern."
Nonetheless, the FBI's domestic terrorism web page doesn't mention Islam or Muslim in conjunction with domestic terrorism: "Today's domestic terror threats run the gamut, from hate-filled white supremacists ... to highly destructive eco-terrorists ... to violence-prone anti-government extremists ... to radical separatist groups."
Let's add another clue for Obama, Durbin, the FBI, Graham, Schieffer, and their fellow "nut"-detectors such as Evan Thomas of Newsweek. Check out the 24 photos of the FBI's most wanted terrorists.
Altogether now -- can you say M-U-S-L-I-M T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T-S?
Jan LaRue is Senior Legal Analyst with the American Civil Rights Union, former Chief Counsel at Concerned for Women, former Legal Studies Director at Family Research Council, and former Senior Counsel for the National Law Center for Children and Families.
