"It's unclear if religion was a factor in this shooting," said Chris Matthews.
"Allahu Akbar," screamed Major Hasan as he opened fire on innocent people, killing 13 and crippling many others.
Yes, yes, anyone knows (and must ritually reiterate) that most Muslims are good, decent citizens, etc. etc.
All this goes without saying, but if one doesn't say it at every mention of the Islamic threat one is automatically regarded as morally comparable to a terrorist. Sigh . . .
But the same could have been said about German Americans in the late 1940s. That didn't change what a great many other Germans were doing to Europe and threatening to do to the rest of the world.
“U.S. Homeland Security officials are working with groups around the United States to head off any possible anti-Muslim backlash following the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas.”To which the columnist Mona Charen (here) responded: "Hogwash."
The backlash trope is trotted out after every episode of terrorist violence. But it is as false as it is dangerous. This image of a nation on a hair trigger for violence against Muslims is a calumny. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, though millions were inflamed by grief and outrage, there was no broad-based “backlash” against Muslim Americans. ...Many of my friends have decided that charity and concern for victims means being more concerned about the vastly overstated specter of a "backlash" against their co-religionists than about the very real threat to completely innocent people posed by Islamic fanatics.
The repeated invocation of this libel has had an effect, though. It has succeeded in intimidating many Americans about the proper bounds of discussion. General Casey reinforces this timidity when he frets that “our diversity” may be a casualty of the attack at Fort Hood. He and the Obama administration are obscuring the real challenge Americans face.
Our challenge is not to transcend the demons of vengeance clawing at our souls. Our challenge is to deal intelligently with a threat that arises from religious convictions. Non-bigoted observers can see that while the vast majority of the world’s Muslims are not extremists, a significant minority are. And it matters what people believe.
We don’t like to pass judgment on others’ religious convictions. That’s fine. But when a religious belief spurs violence and mass murder, it becomes political, and it becomes a proper concern of the military and security services.
Worldwide, Muslims believing themselves to be advancing the faith have committed more than 14,000 acts of violence just since 9/11. You know the litany: Madrid, London, Bali, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Amman. The list is long and bloody — and it includes many innocent Muslims.
Federal agents have thwarted planned terror attacks on Fort Dix, N.J., folded up a terror ring in Lackawanna, N.Y., and uncovered plots against the nation’s financial centers, the World Bank, the Sears Tower, the New York subway system, the Los Angeles airport, the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, ten airliners landing in the U.S. (the liquid-bomb plot), JFK airport, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Prudential Building in Newark, N.J., among others. ...
We have created a climate in which members of the military were afraid to raise questions about the bald and blatant Islamist comments Major Nidal Hassan expressed over many years. He was overheard saying “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square.” He was caught proselytizing his patients. ... Yet no one raised a red flag. Might be interpreted as anti-Muslim bigotry. And so the military took no action against a man who loudly advertised his extremist sympathies. Thirteen Americans paid for that with their lives.
If any good were to come out of the Fort Hood massacre it would be a new clarity about what we are fighting. Islamism is the enemy. Moderate Muslims are allies in the cause. We should no more shrink from confronting and battling Islamism than we would from any of the “isms” we destroyed in the 20th century.
Andrew McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, has a comment here:
The FBI and the rest of our Islamophilic government have their story, and they’re sticking to it. The terrorists’ siege on our nation has nothing to do with Islam. It is the work of al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda terrorists — so the catechism goes — are not true Muslims. Sure, Osama bin Laden & Co. accurately quote Islamic scriptural injunctions to wage jihad against non-Muslims. But never mind that: Islam is an irenic, unmitigated good; in fact, it is one of our best weapons against terrorism.Sometimes one has to laugh to keep from crying. This is no laughing matter, and I will be labeled an Islamophobe for this link, but maybe a little well aimed humor can bring us to our senses:
Come again? If all the terrorists are Muslims and all the terrorists say scriptures that plainly command killing are inspiring them to kill, how could Islam be an asset? Don’t go spoiling a feel-good theory by asking a lot of questions — that would be almost like an investigation, and when it comes to Islam, the FBI doesn’t do investigation.
If it did, it might stumble onto all sorts of things we’d just as soon not know. We’d have to start acknowledging that Salafist ideology (the strain of Islam endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni terrorist organizations) is prevalent in American mosques. ...
To stop bad things from happening, you have to come to grips with what causes them. We won’t. ... And with Hasan, the biggest challenge was not whether to investigate an infiltrator wearing a neon “Islamist” sign, but how to promote him up the ladder and burnish our diversity cred while intimidating the suspicious into silence.
3 comments:
Does anyone recall the denouement of the film version of Dinesen's Babette's Feast, the "real French dinner?"
General Löwenhielm tries to compliment this and that tasty morsel, but the sisters and their father's little aging flock all try to ignore the sumptuous food and talk of the weather, etc., much to the General's confusion.
The MSM, the Administration, and the rest of the PC-squads are like that aging flock; afraid of "sinning" by mentioning the obvious.
IMO, "PC" simply means the new prohibitions beyond which one strays into the dangerous realm of the Sacred; that is, one courts becoming a certifiable sacrificial victim oneself by not dutifully lining up with the herd.
The Scimitar is one-with the Sacred, structurally speaking, save places where the Holy Spirit is at work in individuals.
Are the PC-guardians one-with the Sacred? They are a mixture: falling that way, but also hypocritically concerned with keeping the pipelines flowing. If it weren't for the petro wealth of the Saudis, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Similar in satirical spirit to the posted video is Mike Royko's hilarious (in my opinion) column from 1995. You might say he anticipated some of our thoughts:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1995/05/11/ED55639.DTL
It's worth a read.
df
Greetings,
May I send this one along?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/10/alexios-marakis-assaulted_n_353022.html
We speak carefully to try to not inflame the unstable. It is why some of us who are anti-abortion want the more radical anti-abortion crowd to turn down their rhetoric.
Ad Astra Per Aspera,
Kevin
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