Nidal Malik Hasan, who was at the time a major in the U.S. Army, in November 2009 opened fire at Fort Hood while screaming “Allahu akbar,” murdering 14 people and injuring 43. Now he is now on death row at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, and he is having a good month: Hasan is thrilled that the Taliban have taken over Afghanistan.
It was revealed Wednesday that on August 18, Hasan wrote a letter addressing the Taliban, crowing “WE HAVE WON” and adding: “Congratulations on your victory over those who hate for the Laws of All-Mighty God to be supreme on the land. I pray to Allah that He helps you implement Shariah Law full, correctly and fairly.”
Hasan asked his attorney, retired Army Col. John Galligan, to get his letter to the Taliban. Galligan, who has dealt with this monster for a long time, said: “I’m not at all surprised by Maj. Nidal Hasan’s recent statement — he’s always been consistent in the terms of his support for the governments to be rooted upon Sharia law. Given the Taliban victory in Afghanistan and President Biden’s apparent capitulation on many fronts, Nidal Hasan and I are anxious to see what, if any, action will be taken with respect to the individuals still incarcerated at Guantanamo.”
Indeed. But the strange case of Nidal Malik Hasan shows that Biden isn’t the first to have capitulated. In fact, Hasan’s career trajectory neatly encapsulates much of the failure and wishful thinking that has characterized our response to the 9/11 attacks. As is detailed in Arab Winter Comes to America, Hasan rose through Army ranks even as he justified jihad suicide bombing and spouted hatred for America, and he did so with extraordinarily positive recommendations. In an evaluation dated March 13, 2009, just short of eight months before his jihad attack, Hasan’s superiors 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 farther, 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.”
It is likely, given the fact that Hasan had aroused the alarm of his colleagues with his talk of jihad, that these glowing recommendations stemmed more from the fear of those who wrote them that they would be accused of “Islamophobia” than from a genuine and honest assessment of Hasan’s capabilities. Even in 2009, Army officials knew that to register suspicion that a Muslim military officer was a jihadi was to commit career suicide and risk being plastered all over CNN and the New York Times as an example of the “Islamophobia” that had to be rooted out of the military.
And so, ultimately, Hasan did indeed “contribute to our psychological understanding of Islamic nationalism and how it may relate to events of national security,” but not in the way the author of this fulsome evaluation expected, and not even in a way that military and intelligence officials are able to capitalize upon. They can’t capitalize upon it because they are hamstrung by a politically correct willful ignorance about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat – a willful ignorance that became official Obama administration policy in 2010, at the behest of Leftist and Islamic groups.
Not long after the Fort Hood massacre, then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared: “This was an individual who does not represent the Muslim faith” – despite the fact that Hasan’s repeated explanations and justifications of his murders were based wholly and solely on Islamic teaching. Army Chief of Staff George Casey even went so far as to say that barring Muslims from the military or subjecting them to additional scrutiny would be worse than the massacre itself: “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”
All these years later, Nidal Hasan himself has succinctly summed up what all that means: “We have won.” Twelve years after Hasan committed mass murder for Allah, the U.S. government remains institutionally committed to ignoring and denying who the “we” are that he meant. The denial and willful ignorance regarding the global jihad is near-total. It’s absolute madness, and it only ensures that there will be more Nidal Malik Hasans in the future.
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