The cultural dissembling about the terror at Fort Hood

I want to be careful and measured in my comments about the Fort Hood murders by Major Hasan. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that this was not some spontaneous eruption by some stressed-out coward who feared getting killed in Iraq. Rather, Hasan meticulously and calmly planned and executed his attack, fully expecting and hoping to be killed. A suicide shooter, as it were.

The President, who was so quick to jump to the wrong conclusions about Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley (who is White) in the incident involving Harvard Professor Louis Gates (who is Black), has urged everyone not to jump to conclusions about Hasan and his motives. Mr. Obama not long ago felt free, based on racial prejudices ingrained by his years of immersion in the multiculti vortex of American left-liberalism, publicly and eagerly to blame Crowley, even while casually admitting he did not have all the facts. Yet, suddenly, he is concerned that there not be rash judgment based on hypothesized anti-Muslim prejudice.

The American media have been similarly disengaged from reality. The alleged murder of a census worker not long ago (which now seems not to have been a murder, but a suicide) immediately caused mass speculation by the media about the involvement of hypothetical anti-federal government rightwingers. The murder of notorious abortion doctor George Tiller by a lone shooter was immediately attributed to the broader conservative anti-abortion movement. No similar attribution to liberal pro-abortion groups is made when a pro-abortion shooter kills an elderly anti-abortion activist in Michigan. When a deranged white supremacist shoots a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the media seamlessly connects this to conservatives in general, despite the fact that the shooter had published anti-George W. Bush screeds. But one best not cast the net too broadly when, more than once, Muslims attack Jews and Jewish institutions in the U.S. and Canada.

This reticence to call things as they are as to one particular religious group is cultural. It is part of a civilizational self-debasement that allows the Western media, art, and entertainment complex cheerfully to publish depictions that are blasphemous and insulting to the eyes of Christians, but to shy away from publishing anything even critical of Islam or Muhammad. A crucifix in urine is art, but unfounded rumors of a urinated-upon Quran at Guantanamo raises a world-wide hue and cry. Indeed, Qurans at Guantanamo must be handled with gloves so that the dirty hands of the infidels do not touch them before they are handed to the terrorist detainees. Meanwhile, burning of churches and murder of Christian families in Pakistan is a ho-hum matter unworthy of the attention of the world’s secular human rights elite.

We are seeing the same thing regarding Major Hasan. Despite the large amount of evidence that has quickly become available, we are relentlessly commanded by the President, the media, and even the Army staff not to rush to any conclusions about the killer’s motives. As that noted practitioner of calm and reasoned reflection, Chris Matthews, declared, “We may never know if religion was a factor at Fort Hood.” Those same media, assorted politicians, and Muslim advocacy groups (especially CAIR with its checkered personnel history) very quickly warn, however, about the imagined looming danger of anti-Muslim reprisals that put Muslims in fear of their non-Muslim American neighbors. Never mind that, after each attack by Muslims on their neighbors and fellow-citizens, such reprisals don’t materialize, though new attacks by Muslims do. It’s not acceptable to jump to conclusions about non-hypothetical violence by Muslims, but quite fine to jump to conclusions about the hypothetical violence by non-Muslims.

In like manner, there has been an almost instantaneous attempt by the media, Muslim groups, and Hasan’s family to sanitize the story, with an emerging line of how he was insulted for being a Muslim. Assuming for th sake of argument that these insults occurred, very rarely is any possible context for such alleged insults provided, such as his heated denunciations of the war in Iraq as, among other things, a war against Islam. This is an effort at moral equivalence and to shift the blame from Hasan and Islamist influence on him, to Hasan’s victims or, at least, to the United States more broadly. This is such a tried-and-true tactic by now that Mark Steyn has declared it to be parodic: “Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: ‘British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.’”

Nor, as the preceding sentence shows, is this blame-shifting and excusing or explaining-away of radical Islamist terror new. Mark Steyn has an article about last year’s terrorist attack by radical Muslims on Bombay. As part of that attack, the terrorists made a detour to the only Jewish center in Bombay, Chabad House, and then tortured and murdered the rabbi and his pregnant wife. And we’re not talking carefully-controlled waterboarding here. Then, too, the media somehow managed to trace the problem back to American policy here or there and speculated that is was just a fluke that the terrorists happened to come upon Chabad House. As Mark Steyn points out,  ”Two ‘inflamed moderates’ entered the Chabad House, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!,’ tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young Rabbi’s pregnant wife. Their two-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mown down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.” Ah yes, it was the New York Times. But, still. Shouldn’t there be some use of common sense, even by the Times, and credence be given to the surviving terrorist, who said that the Jewish Center had been targeted for a year?

Among the facts about Hasan are that he attended a mosque in the D.C. area where a radical (and now banned) imam preached. That imam was the spiritual leader of three of the 9/11 hijackers. Hasan attended services there about the time that two of those hijackers did, as well. Comments about Hasan’s reaction to those preachings and his actions at Fort Hood show that Hasan took the imam’s inflammatory and bigoted hate-mongering to heart. A number of survivors have reported that he yelled “Allahu Akhbar” as he began his murderous assault, the traditional cry of the Muslim as he goes into battle. He ranted about the rightness of violence against “unbelievers.” Among other things, he said that infidels should have their heads cut off and have boiling oil poured down their throats. Someone with his name had blog postings with similar rantings and praise for suicide bombers, equating them with a soldier who throws himself on a live grenade to save his buddies. Come to think of it, that sounds like something one might overhear at a faculty meeting. I wonder if that moral equivalency also applies to suicide bombers who kill children at an Israeli pizzeria.

That famous caution not to jump to conclusions did not, by the way, prevent the authorities from declaring almost immediately that this was not a terror plot. Yet the evidence is clear that Major Hasan planned this for several weeks, at the very least. His acquisition of this kind of civilian weaponry and his careful settlement of accounts with his landlord and others show that this was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Had he used a bomb, rather than this kind of lethally effective armament, to kill and maim this many people, would we still hesitate to call this a terror attack? After all, his lack of rationality and emotional control does not mean he had no terrorist motives. Suicide bombers show similar traits. Why not a suicide shooter?