A consummate son of liberalism

Nidal Hasan, the mass murderer of Fort Hood, is a poster boy for Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society. The Law states that under liberalism, the more incompetent, unassimilable, or hostile a minority or non-Western person is, the more lies must be told to protect him, because the more negative the truth about a minority person, the more racist it is to speak the truth about him. Thus, because the truth about Hasan was not just bad, but horrendously bad, to speak the truth about him would have made the speaker seem, not just racist, but horrendously racist. This explains why, when Hasan, giving a lecture to a classroom filled with military doctors, approvingly quoted the Koranic injunction that non-Muslims should be punished by having boiling oil being poured down their throats, his superiors did nothing about it. This explains why, as a government official told Fox News, investigators felt that if they looked into Hasan’s contacts with a terror-supporting imam, they would have been “crucified.”

Hasan was blessed with a trifecta of undesirable traits that assured his success in today’s Army. He wasn’t just unassimilable, believing in the sharia law which is totally incompatible with the American law and way of life; and he wasn’t just hostile and dangerous, openly expressing enthusiastic support for Muslim terrorism against Americans, but, in addition to all that, he was, according medical colleagues of his interviewed by CNN, woefully sub-par intellectually. He survived as a medical student and as an Army psychiatrist, because, in keeping with the First Law, the less he belonged in medical school, in the medical profession, and in the Army, the greater became the compulsion on the part of those institutions to keep him there.

Here is the CNN article. I’ve bolded key passages.

Classmates: Hasan defended suicide bombings, held Islamist views

Fort Hood, Texas (CNN)—Those who knew Nidal Malik Hasan before he was a major in the Army—and the suspect in last week’s mass killing at Fort Hood—say he was long known for militant Islamist views.

Doctors who crossed paths with Hasan in medical programs paint a picture of a subpar student who wore his religious views on his sleeve.

Several doctors who knew Hasan spoke to CNN, but only on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation of the shooting, which left 12 soldiers and one civilian dead and dozens of other people wounded.

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who faces 13 counts of premeditated murder, “was clearly espousing Islamist ideology” during his time as a medical student at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, one of his former classmates told CNN.

Hasan’s family has revealed little about him, saying in media interviews that Hasan was a “good American” and a lifelong Muslim who complained he was harassed in the Army because of his religion.

His former classmates describe a much more militant Hasan.

His presentations for school were often laced with extremist Muslim views, one source said.

“Is your allegiance to Sharia law or the United States?” students once challenged Hasan, the source said.

“Sharia law,” Hasan responded, according to the source.

The incident was corroborated by another doctor who was present.

The source recalled another instance in which Hasan was asked if the U.S. Constitution was a brilliant document. Hasan replied, “No, not particularly,” according to the source.

The former classmate told CNN that he voiced concerns about Hasan to supervisors at the school.

A second former medical school colleague of Hasan said several people raised concerns about Hasan’s overall competence.

Even though Hasan earned his medical degree and residency, some of his fellow students believed Hasan “didn’t have the intellect” to be in the program and was not academically rigorous in his coursework.

Hasan “was not fit to be in the military, let alone in the mental health profession,” this classmate told CNN. “No one in class would ever have referred a patient to him or trusted him with anything.”

The first classmate echoed this sentiment.

Hasan was “coddled, accommodated and pushed through that masters of public health despite substandard performance,” the classmate said. He was “put in the fellowship program because they didn’t know what to do with him.”

The second classmate said he witnessed at least two of Hasan’s PowerPoint discussions that included what he described as extremist views.

In these presentations, which were supposed to be about health, Hasan justified suicide bombings and spoke about the persecution of Muslims in the Middle East, in the United States and in the U.S. military, the source said.

Some in the crowd rolled their eyes or muttered under their breath, he said, and others were clearly uncomfortable.

Those in the audience, which included program supervisors, did not loudly object to Hasan’s presentations, but did complain to their higher-ups afterward.

The supervisors expressed “appreciation, understanding and agreement” that the complaints would be discussed, but it was unclear what action, if any, came, the source said.

When the classmate challenged Hasan personally, Hasan dodged the questions, the source said.

Despite the controversy that his schoolwork created, classmates did not view Hasan as mentally unstable or psychotic, the source said.

Questions remain over how much Hasan’s behavior and actions in school were reflected in his personnel files.

Col. Kimberly Kesling, deputy commander of Clinical Services for Darnell Medical Center at Fort Hood and Hasan’s supervisor at the post, told reporters last week that Hasan was doing a good job in Texas.

“As a supervisor, I am aware of the job performance of people coming into our organization, that is part of our credentialing process,” Kesling said. “The types of things that were reported to me via his evaluation report were things that concerned me, but did not raise red flags toward this [the shootings] in any way, shape, or form.”

Hasan came under investigation last year when his contacts with radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki were intercepted by terrorism investigators monitoring the cleric’s communications, a federal law enforcement official told CNN.

An employee of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigative Services, assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, decided to drop the investigation after reviewing the intercepted communications and Hasan’s personnel files.

Hasan remained hospitalized Thursday from gunshot wounds he received from two police officers who responded to last week’s shooting.

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Lydia McGrew writes:

And just think: At first you couldn’t believe the stuff about how infidels deserve to have boiling oil poured down their throats, etc.

This whole incident definitely belongs in the file labeled “We Knew It Was Bad, But We Didn’t Know It Was This Bad.” For all of us conservatives, I think, even those of us who are really pessimistic.

Terry Morris writes:

Lydia is exactly right. In point of fact, looking back upon it, even I — someone who is skeptical of any and all information issuing forth from the MSM — wanted to believe that Hasan was shot and ultimately stopped by a petite female cop named Kimberly.

November 14

LA writes:

There are many ways of formulating the First Law. Here is one: The more negative the turth about a minority or non-Western person, the more racist you are for mentioning it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 12, 2009 09:35 PM | Send