The shootings at Fort Hood last week have provoked a media feeding frenzy.  Questions abound, and there is no dearth of speculation as to the shooter’s motives.  Most articles I have seen waste no time pointing out that the shooter was a Muslim, that he exclaimed “Allahu akbar” before shooting, and that he is linked with radical imams and possibly Al Qaeda.  That’s from the ostensibly “impartial” media, but there are also a few extremely distasteful editorial perspectives that are unfortunately quite mainstream that I wanted to comment on today.  I’m afraid my ability to edit sarcasm out of my posts declines in direct proportion to the insanity and hypocrisy with which I’m confronted, so bear with me.

First, Forbes featured an article by Tunku Varadarajan entitled “Going Muslim“, a play on the old phrase “going postal”.  He describes it thusly:

As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub–disconcertingly–“Going Muslim.” This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage–the camouflage of integration–in an act of revelatory catharsis.

He then cranks up the paranoia level and asks how should we “address the threat posed by the fact that, of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in our midst, there are a few (perhaps many more than a few) who are so radicalized that they would kill their fellow Americans?”  Won’t someone save us from the few (how many?) Muslims that are perfectly camoflauged in our midst, just waiting for the perfect moment to strike?  I’m not quite sure what Varadarajan would suggest, given that he acknowledges that we cannot afford to “check all people–including Chinese grandmothers” like we do for airport security (and who doesn’t love airport security?).  Maybe we should bring back internment camps, at least until this War on Terror is over? Except, this war might last forever (or at least as long as the Cold War, we are told) so perhaps that’s a bit impractical too.  We’ve only had internment camps during “hot” wars against known enemies, and it’s much harder to do on a large scale against amorphous enemies like “communists” or “terror”.

In the end, he leaves us with this nugget:

Let the first lesson of the Hasan atrocity be this: The U.S. Army has to be a PC-free zone. Our democracy and our way of life depend on it.

Yes, the armed forces have long been known as paragons of political correctness. Wow, both our democracy AND our way of life depend on getting PC out of the military??  Both our corporate-run democracy and our consumerist-at-all-cost way of life seem pretty impervious to any assault (other than a lack of available credit).

A similar example comes from a syndicated column by Cal Thomas, the former vice-president of the Moral Majority, entitled “Jihadists in the military“.  Stick with me here, there’s an enormous amount of stupidity to wade through.  He begins:

By now, the script should be disturbingly familiar. Whether in the Middle East, or increasingly in America, a fanatical Muslim blows up or goes on a shooting spree, killing many. This is quickly followed by “condemnations” from “Muslim civil rights groups,” like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). We are then warned by the president and some newspaper editorials not to jump to conclusions, or to stereotype. Yasser Arafat wrote this script, which he used with great success throughout his bloody career as a terrorist.

How many Muslims in America have blown up or gone on a shooting spree?  Now there’s two, I think, and one of them was executed this week.  Of course, it could be that I’m unaware of the new wave of Muslim violence sweeping our heimat.   Oh, there are plenty of shootings, but most of the news reports don’t seem to indicate whether the shooters are Muslim, Christian, or none of the above.   Consider these examples (from just this week):

• An engineer, Jason Rodriguez, allegedly crumbled under stress and fatally shot one employee and wounded five others in Orlando.
• In Portland, Robert Beiser shot up the medical lab where his wife worked.  They were going through a divorce and now they are both dead. Several others working at the lab were injured.
• There were two shootings in Walterboro, SC last night.  These follow a spate of shootings lately in the area.
• Police have arrested Milton Lattimore for allegedly gunning down three women sitting in a car in East St. Louis over the weekend.
• A gunman in Maryland opened fire in a speakeasy, killing 1 and wounding 6.
• Police in Delaware have arrested Joshua Callahan and Lavell Cunningham for a shooting spree at three different locations, although nobody was killed.

None of those alleged to have perpetrated these shootings are known to be Muslim, nor do they have Muslim names. Perhaps they are some of those camoflauged Muslims that Varadarajan just warned us about?  Like Keith Ellison and Barack HUSSEIN Obama (whom some people still think is a Muslim “Manchurian Candidate”).

Thomas continues:

If you were an enemy of America, not only would you fight overseas and develop nuclear weapons (Iran), you would also engage in an even more effective strategy by striking at America’s underbelly. This is our most vulnerable region because we now tolerate virtually everything, indulge in political correctness and subscribe to a bogus belief that if radical Islamists can see we mean them no harm, they will mean us no harm.

But wait, the American military is fighting overseas and developing nuclear weapons.  I wonder if Thomas includes our own military as enemies of America?  And here’s that pesky political correctness again.  That must be really pernicious stuff, treating people as if they have some kind of a right not to be discriminated against.

And Cal’s right, we bend over backwards trying to make sure that radical Islamists see that we mean them no harm.  Well, there are the small matters of  illegally invading Iraq and Afghanistan (which have caused to date over 100,000 and tens of thousands of civilian casualties, respectively), not to mention our unflinching support for Israel as it continues its illegal occupation of Palestine.  Oh, and remember the time when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared that the sanctions on Iraq which killed over a half-million Iraqi children were “worth it”?  That sly propaganda master Osama Bin Laden used that statement to show that perhaps the U.S. didn’t really care all that much about Muslim life.   But those examples barely deserve mention compared to our runaway political correctness which has led us “tolerate virtually everything”:

The federal government at all levels has hired and promoted Muslims to influential positions. It requires “sensitivity training” for federal employees, including those who work at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Last week, the House Judiciary Committee, dominated by liberal Democrats, defied the White House and removed from the USA Patriot Act a tool for tracking non-U.S. citizens in anti-terrorism investigations. As our enemies grow stronger and more emboldened, they see us becoming weaker and less committed.

See, I knew we’d get down to the real problems in America today: weakening of the Patriot Act, sensitivity training, and hiring and promoting of Muslims. Perhaps we should expand the beloved Patriot Act, since the provision that Cal mentions about non-citizens wouldn’t have done any good in this case– Hasan was a natural-born citizen. I can’t wait to find out what’s next:

No amount of evidence — from Koran verses urging the killing of “infidels,” to cries of “God is great,” reportedly shouted by the alleged Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan — will cure our self-deception. Sun Tzu famously wrote that all war is deception. But it takes two to deceive and the United States is behaving like a willing partner.

Those silly  Muslims, they really believe the verses in their holy book that tells them to kill infidels.  That’s completely different from us in the glorious USA, we know to completely ignore our God’s commands to kill infidels, witches, homosexuals, fortunetellers, people who hit or curse their parents, adulterers, fornicators, unbelievers, false prophets, and others (see here).  Sometimes, the radicalized Christians in our midst still kill abortion doctors, but that’s the only category of people (besides Muslims and Communists) Christians are still allowed to kill.

The shooter yelled “God is great”?  He probably mistakenly thought he was at Fort Jackson, where soldiers get their pictures taken with rifles and bibles, and learn that the military is God’s tool to punish unbelievers.  Or maybe he saw that Air Force Academy video which says that the military is creating “government-paid missionaries”.  Or maybe he got confused about which holy book was his when the military’s Commander-in-Chief pointed to the bible as a valid reason for waging war in Iraq.  Maybe he picked up that “God is great” thing when he read the military pamphlet that actively promotes Christianity as a means of deterring soldiers from comitting suicide, or maybe he was in a bible study that encourage soldiers to “hunt people for Jesus“.  Or maybe he did some work for Blackwater, whose founder “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.”  It’s so easy to forget which holy book to follow when there’s so many going around.

People claiming to know Hasan told interviewers he made frequent statements against the wars and the U.S. presence in Islamic countries. Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, told reporters after he was briefed on the shootings that Hasan “took a lot of advanced training in shooting.” Why would a psychiatrist need advanced training in shooting unless he believed in murder as therapy? Shouldn’t that, coupled with his statements about “the aggressor” and other actions — including his preference for Muslim clothing — have alerted someone in authority that he might be a time bomb waiting to go off? Yes, absolutely. But who wants to jeopardize a career by raising such questions and becoming the target of “civil rights groups” and politically correct dupes? Intimidating Americans into silence when they know better is also a very effective strategy when fighting a war.

So now speaking out against the wars and the illegal U.S. presence is Islamic countries is now a predictor of violent behavior?  Someone better keep an eye on Noam Chomsky and Ron Paul, they’ve been doing that for years. I wish someone could provide a simple explanation for why a soldier on active duty in the military who is about to be deployed to a war zone overseas would need or want “advanced training in shooting”.  I’m afraid we must assume that he believed in “murder as therapy” unless someone can provide a simpler explanation?  For example, if he were a member of some organization that used firearms on a regular basis.  Or if he were going to a dangerous part of the world for an extended period.   In any case, I must admit that his preference for Muslim clothing is an obvious red flag– this is America.

You may have a right to free speech, but not to free dress.  Anyone dressing like a Muslim should be rounded up and interrogated for potential terrorist affiliations.

Sound minds not brainwashed by our own “re-educators” should have seen this coming. Though born in America to Jordanian immigrant parents, Hasan described himself as a “Palestinian.” He got into trouble by attempting to proselytize some of his patients.

That son of a bitch. How can he just walk around describing himself as a Palestinian, when clearly he was of Jordanian heritage?  That alone should have tipped everyone off– most Americans are astute enough to tell the differences between individuals from various Muslim countries that they should have easily picked up on such a blatant falsehood.  After many years of warfare against Muslims around the world, the American people have definitely learned enough about Muslim culture, history, and the Islamic faith that there is no way they could mistake a Jordanian for a Palestinian!

Most top federal agencies, including the Pentagon and DHS, now have offices of “civil liberties,” offices recommended by the 9/11 Commission to focus on “outreach” to the Muslim community. In this, they follow efforts by the Bush administration, which dispatched Karen Hughes to tell Muslim women in Saudi Arabia that American women are so free they can drive their own cars. The Saudi women were not impressed.

Amen.  For too long, Muslims all over the world have been largely unimpressed by our attempts to spread western style capitalism and decadent consumerism to their countries.  And it’s high time we abandoned the pretense that we still have “civil liberties”.

It’s one thing to be suckered by others. It’s quite another to sucker yourself.

How much longer will we tolerate fighting this war as if it were a minor crime wave? Our enemies are fighting to win and they are fighting everywhere, including within our borders. People trained to appear nonthreatening, until the threat becomes obvious and it is too late to do anything about it, are infiltrating our government and society at every level.

All too true, but I wonder why he’s changed to criticizing the close links between corporations and government at this point?  Granted, lobbyists and Congresspeople are trained to appear non-threatening, and have been infiltrating our government at every level, but it seems like a bit of a non-sequitur.  And we’ve got to stop fighting this war (err, these wars– we’re still in Iraq) as if it were a minor crime wave.  For most minor crime waves, we are comfortable with tens of thousands of troops deployed, countless private contractors, and spending trillions of dollars.  But if we’re going to fight to win (like the enemies within our borders), we’ve got to spend some real resources!

It is irrelevant that some have put the number of radicalized Muslims worldwide at 10 percent. Even if that figure is accurate, one hundred million jihadists can cause a lot of damage, as they plot the destruction of Western democracies. Other wars have been won with far fewer soldiers and far fewer dupes.

Do we have any estimates on the numbers of radicalized Christians?  I couldn’t find one immediately, but with 2.1 billion adherents worldwide, even if only 1% of them are dangerous extremists they could still cause a lot of damage.  I’m not sure if that would be more damage than 10% of Islam’s 1.5 billion adherents, but I’m with Cal, I say we get rid of religion.  And don’t forget about those fundamentalist Christian extremists in the military (see above).  I bet they could do a lot of damage if someone gave them some weapons.

The sad truth is that these xenophobic sentiments are always lurking hidden in our public discourse about war, but it takes an instance like the Fort Hood shootings to bring them all to the surface.  Eight years on, the war against terror is getting a little blasé.  Public sentiment is turning against the war in Afghanistan, so linking any type of violence to “terrorism” provides a useful way for the hawks to stir up support. It’s absurd to attempt to categorize all the adherents of any religion into these sorts of ideologically uniform categories, but it happens frequently.  It’s sickening, it’s repugnant, and unfortunately, it’s par for the course in imperial America.

Homeland Security Chairman Senator Lieberman has expressed the view that Hasan was probably a “self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist.”  It’s difficult for me to find any meaningful definition of terrorism that would not also be an indictment of the policies of the United States government.   For example, the American Heritage Dictionary defines “terrorism” as

“The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.”

So, by that definition, the United States is a terrorist organization.  Our government (counts as an “organized group” for definition purposes) first threatened to use force against Afghanistan if they didn’t immediately hand over Bin Laden (coercion, for political reasons).  When they resisted, we initiated the illegal use of violence with the intention of intimidating or coercing them into compliance.  Thus far, we’ve been unsuccessful, but the war rages on. Or have we given up the pretense of looking for Bin Laden?  I’m never certain which pretexts are the current favored ones anymore.

Lastly, Jacob Hornberger conducts a provocative thought experiment: what if the U.S. Invaded the Vatican to promote Democracy?