U.S. military so under the thumb of Islam that even Time is amazed

Not only does the 86 page Pentagon report on the failures leading to the Fort Hood massacre not mention Islam, it doesn’t even mention the name of the mass murderer, Major Nidal Hasan.

To my surprise, hyper-liberal Time magazine has an article on this, “The Fort Hood Report: Why No Mention of Islam?,” by Mark Thompson:

The U.S. military’s just-released report into the Fort Hood shootings spends 86 pages detailing various slipups by Army officers but not once mentions Major Nidal Hasan by name or even discusses whether the killings may have had anything to do with the suspect’s view of his Muslim faith. And as Congress opens two days of hearings on Wednesday into the Pentagon probe of the Nov. 5 attack that left 13 dead, lawmakers want explanations for that omission.

John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 commission and Navy Secretary during the Reagan Administration, says a reluctance to cause offense by citing Hasan’s view of his Muslim faith and the U.S. military’s activities in Muslim countries as a possible trigger for his alleged rampage reflects a problem that has gotten worse in the 40 years that Lehman has spent in and around the U.S. military. The Pentagon report’s silence on Islamic extremism “shows you how deeply entrenched the values of political correctness have become,” he told TIME on Tuesday. “It’s definitely getting worse, and is now so ingrained that people no longer smirk when it happens.” (See pictures of Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s apartment.)

The apparent lack of curiosity into what allegedly drove Hasan to kill isn’t in keeping with the military’s ethos; it’s a remarkable omission for the U.S. armed forces, whose young officers are often ordered to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War with its command to know your enemy. In midcareer, they study the contrast between capabilities and intentions, which is why they aren’t afraid of a British nuclear weapon but do fear the prospect of Iran getting one.

Yet the leaders of the two-month Pentagon review, former Army Secretary Togo West and the Navy’s onetime top admiral, Vernon Clark, told reporters last week that they didn’t drill down into Hasan’s motives. “Our concern is with actions and effects, not necessarily with motivations,” West said. Added Clark: “We certainly do not cite a particular group.” Part of their reticence, they said, was to avoid running afoul of the criminal probe of Hasan that is now under way. Both are declining interview requests before their congressional testimony, a Pentagon spokesman said. (Read TIME’s cover story on the Fort Hood massacre.)

But without a motive, there would have been no murder. Hasan wore his radical Islamic faith and its jihadist tendencies in the same way he wore his Army uniform. He allegedly proselytized within the ranks, spoke out against the wars his Army was waging in Muslim countries and shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is great) as he gunned down his fellow soldiers. Those who served alongside Hasan find the Pentagon review wanting. “The report demonstrates that we are unwilling to identify and confront the real enemy of political Islam,” says a former military colleague of Hasan, speaking privately because he was ordered not to talk about the case. “Political correctness has brainwashed us to the point that we no longer understand our heritage and cannot admit who, or what, the enemy stands for.”

The Department of Defense Independent Review Related to Fort Hood, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is limited in scope. Despite the title of its report—Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood—there is only a single page dedicated to the chapter called “Oversight of the Alleged Perpetrator.” Much more space is given to military personnel policies (11 pages), force protection (six pages) and the emergency response to the shootings (12 pages).

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut said he was “disappointed” because the inquiry “does not adequately recognize the specific threat posed by violent Islamist extremism to our military,” and added that the homeland-security panel he chairs will investigate. The Congressman whose district includes Fort Hood agrees. “The report ignores the elephant in the room—radical Islamic terrorism is the enemy,” says Republican Representative John Carter. “We should be able to speak honestly about good and bad without feeling like you’ve done something offensive to society.”

The report lumps in radical Islam with other fundamentalist religious beliefs, saying that “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor” and that “religious-based violence is not confined to members of fundamentalist groups.” But to some, that sounds as if the lessons of 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, where jihadist extremism has driven deadly violence against Americans, are being not merely overlooked but studiously ignored.

January 26

Paul Nachman has sent this e-mail to Time:

In “The Fort Hood Report: Why No Mention of Islam?,” Mark Thompson writes, “Hasan wore his radical Islamic faith and its jihadist tendencies in the same way he wore his Army uniform,” implying that Hasan was an adherent of “radical” Islam. But murderous siege of everything and everyone non-Islamic has been the way of mainstream Islam since the time of Muhummad. That’s the unavoidable, crucial fact Westerners need to grasp—and then draw the requisite conclusions.

Dimitri K. writes:

The common right-wing explanation for this is usually that it is all because of the left. I started to doubt it. Is U.S. military already a leftist organization? [LA replies: Uh, yes. How can there be any question of that, after the Army Chief of staff’s remarks that maintaining diversity was more important than preventing mass murder?] The left-wing Time criticizes U.S. military for being too collaborative with Islam, isn’t it strange? [LA replies: because the military has now gone to such extremes of PC that even Time is thrown by it.]

Another example—it was British who ruled large parts of Islamic world during the times of Empire. They were always reluctant to confront in any way any Islamic traditions or beliefs. Was the British Empire leftist?

I would rather attribute such attitude to general arrogance and too high a self-esteem of modern men, which is characteristic of both the left and the right.

LA replies:

There’s a significant overlap among (1) a certain traditional English attitude of feeling so on top of things that it’s beneath one to notice the pecularities of the duskier peoples or feel threatened by them, (2) the expansive American Anglo-Saxonism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which felt that all peoples can fit within the enlarged Anglo-Saxon tent, and (3) non-discriminatory modern liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 25, 2010 02:25 PM | Send