The Following has been excerpted from Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In by New York Times Best-Selling author Robert Spencer:
During his trial, prosecutors showed that several days before his attack, and even just a few hours before he started shooting, Hasan searched the internet for “jihad” and specifically for articles about Islamic jihadists and Muslim clerics calling for jihad attacks on Americans.
Yet despite these abundant indications that Hasan was engaged in act of Islamic jihad akin to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, albeit on a smaller scale, the Defense Department has classified Hasan’s shootings not as a terrorist act, but as “workplace violence.”
Hasan himself contradicted this classification at his trial, when he pointedly registered his agreement with the prosecution’s contention that, unlike some others who had opened fire in public places, he hadn’t just suddenly snapped or been overcome by an overwhelming paroxysm of rage: “I would like to agree with the prosecution that it wasn’t done under the heat of sudden passion. There was adequate provocation, that these were deploying soldiers that were going to engage in an illegal war.”
Nonetheless, the U.S. government has so far continued to ignore repeated requests from the victims’ families to reclassify the killings and make the victims eligible for the Purple Heart and benefits that are normally accorded to combatants killed or injured in the line of duty.
The disconnect from obvious reality has grown ever wider. The Obama administration’s official unwillingness to face the full reality of the Islamic jihad is all-pervasive, affecting both foreign and domestic policy. Echoed in the mainstream media, it has contributed to an atmosphere in which, during Barack Obama’s second term, Americans are arguably less safe and less informed about the threat they face than ever before. Those who are informed about the threat, or who find themselves confronted by it in one form or another, are often intimidated into silence by the politically correct backlash that is sure to come against them if they dare to speak out.
Nidal Hasan’s own coworkers during his tenure as an army psychiatrist were subject to that intimidation, and their choices illustrate show how deadly effective it is. Although Hasan’s jihadist tendencies were well known, clearly fear that they would be accused of “Islamophobia” prevented his army superiors from acting upon signs of his incipient jihadist tendencies. Instead, they kept promoting him. The AP reported in January 2010 that “a Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan’s medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.”
And so Hasan rose through army ranks and did so with extraordinarily positive recommendations, even as he justified suicide bombing and spouted hatred for America while wearing its uniform. In an evaluation dated March 13, 2009, just short of eight months before his jihad attack, Hasan’s superiors wrote that he displayed “outstanding moral integrity” and praised his project topic for his master’s of public health degree: “the impact of beliefs and culture on views regarding military service during the Global War on Terror.” They even praised him specifically as a Muslim, in passages that their authors must have remembered with stinging regret after his jihad murders: one said that he should be put into a position “that allows others to learn from his perspectives” and declared that his “unique insights into the dimensions of Islam” and his “moral reasoning” could be of “great potential interest and strategic importance to the U.S. Army.”
A July 1, 2009, report went even further, saying that Hasan had “a keen interest in Islamic culture and faith and has shown capacity to contribute to our psychological understanding of Islamic nationalism and how it may relate to events of national security and Army interest in the Middle East and Asia.” Among his “unique skills” were listed “Islamic studies” and “traumatic stress spectrum psychiatric disorders.” The report concluded, “Maj. Hasan has great potential as an Army officer.” At this point his murders were only four months away.
Even during the time when they wrote these effusive recommendations, Hasan’s superiors and the others around him were aware of his pro-jihad statements and were worried by them. “Yet no one in Hasan’s chain of command,” reports the AP, “appears to have challenged his eligibility to hold a secret security clearance even though they could have because the statements raised doubt about his loyalty to the United States.”
The reason for the silence in the face of all these warnings is obvious. Hasan’s superiors were neither stupid nor incompetent. But they no doubt knew what would happen if they removed Hasan from his position or even simply reprimanded and disciplined him for his statements about Islam. They could have been accused of bigotry, intolerance, even racism (despite the fact that Islam is manifestly not a race)—or of “Islamophobia,” the politically correct label used to suggest that any criticism of Islam must arise from irrational fear of and prejudice against Muslims.
That charge is regularly made by Hamas-linked Muslim Brother- hood front groups that pose as Muslim civil rights organizations in the United States, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Army officers who raised questions about Hasan’s loyalty to the United States could easily have found themselves in the midst of a firestorm. It isn’t hard to imagine how events might have played out: the mainstream media would have embarked upon a full-bore witch hunt for the alleged witch hunters of Muslims in the military, interviewing the weeping mothers of Muslim soldiers killed in the line of duty while fighting for the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan. Army generals would have had to answer questions about alleged discrimination against Muslims in the military on the Sunday morning talk shows. And ultimately the president of the United States would have ordered a special effort to make Muslims in the military feel at home and welcome.
Those who complained about Hasan would almost certainly have faced public abuse, media smearing by CAIR and ISNA as “Islamophobes,” and possibly even disciplinary action from their superiors. Chris Matthews, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Bill Maher would have subjected them to nationally broadcast ridicule. All army personnel would have been ordered into sensitivity training, perhaps run by CAIR itself.
For years now CAIR, ISNA, and other Islamic groups in the United States have done all they could to demonize everyone who speaks honestly about the threat of jihad. Since 2009, CAIR has published annual “Islamophobia Reports” that portray everyone who examines how Islamic jihadists justify their violence and make recruits by pointing to Islamic texts and doctrines as sinister, well heeled, and driven by an unrelenting bigotry and hatred.25 The most recent of these reports contains highly tendentious profiles of virtually everyone who has ever written or spoken critically of jihad terror, combined with fantastical attempts to portray them all as part of an organized anti-Muslim cabal, a veritable “Islamophobia network.” “Moderate” Muslim groups such as CAIR and ISNA have issued numerous pro-forma denunciations of terrorism, but the Fort Hood massacre was an indication of how successful their shielding of Islamic supremacism and its most dangerous proponents from any criticism has been: Nidal Hasan was not removed from his post, and no steps were taken to protect anyone else from him. “Islamophobia” was duly avoided.
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