Deeper Thinking about Political Correctness, Diversity and Fort Hood

We should not forget the immediate responses by the media and by our government officials to the shooting at Fort Hood, now that even they are being forced to admit that the shooter may have been influenced by radical Islam. Those responses give us some insight into how the tragedy occurred. The pieces by Mark Steyn and Richard Fernandez (I still think of him as Wretchard) linked below seemed important to me. But some other smart people with related thoughts are linked below, too. Some of the pieces are quite provocative. But if we don't think about the philosophies affecting our government's policies and practices and the assumptions of the elite, these kinds of attacks will be more frequent.

Read some of the background concerning the ways the Fort Hood killer had been excused from scrutiny during his army career, and the excuses made for him immediately after the shootings. Charles Krauthammer:

Time's Joe Klein decried "odious attempts by Jewish extremists ... to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." While none could match Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once you have a sense of the responses to Hasan's behavior before details about his terrorist ties started to be revealed in public, you will appreciate more fully the following excerpts from a post by Mark Steyn:

For the purposes of argument, let's accept the media's insistence that Major Hasan is a lone crazy.

So who's nuttier?

The guy who gives a lecture to other military doctors in which he says non-Muslims should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats?

Or the guys who say "Hey, let's have this fellow counsel our traumatized veterans and then promote him to major and put him on a Homeland Security panel?

Or the Army Chief of Staff who thinks the priority should be to celebrate diversity, even unto death?

Or the Secretary of Homeland Security who warns that the principal threat we face now is an outbreak of islamophobia?

Or the president who says we cannot "fully know" why Major Hasan did what he did, so why trouble ourselves any further?

Or the columnist who, when a man hands out copies of the Koran before gunning down his victims while yelling "Allahu akbar," says you're racist if you bring up his religion?

Or his media colleagues who put Americans in the same position as East Germans twenty years ago of having to get hold of a foreign newspaper to find out what's going on?

General Casey has a point: An army that lets you check either the "home team" or "enemy" box according to taste is certainly diverse. But the logic in the remarks of Secretary Napolitano and others is that the real problem is that most Americans are knuckledragging bigots just waiting to go bananas. . . .

In a nutshell:

The real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.

Getting Philosophical: When the facts about the shootings were still quite preliminary, Wretchard posted an unsettling. generalized piece asking questions about various boundaries between religion and politics. Read it if you dare. Some thoughts from the comment thread on Wretchard's post are discussed in a piece exploring Political Correctness in the West as a cult of human sacrifice. A must-read. Also, (former lefty radical) Roger L. Simon's piece, "Political Correctness as a Murder Weapon".

As a reminder, political correctness is derived from the more intellectually respectable doctrine of cultural relativism (it’s sort of CR’s public “happy face”). In essence, cultural relativism holds that an individual’s beliefs and activities should only be understood in terms of his or her own culture. It’s the ultimate version of “who are we to be the judge?” If Ayatollah Khomeini wishes to oppress all the women and homosexuals in Iran, it’s their way. If Mao seeks to knock off seventy million of his countrymen, so be it. Let the Chinese decide. We shouldn’t impose our values.

On our increasingly tiny globe, this theory – when spelled out – is nothing short of preposterous. It fairly invites a return to the mass murdering ideologies of the Twentieth Century – Nazism, communism, etc – and opens the door wide for Islamism. . . .

Liberal arts professors have a lot to answer for.

Wretchard also wrote a more practical post concerning actions concerning the lack of a rational response to Hasan's actions at Walter Reed. Just one example of the pernicious effects of political correctness in this sad story. We have not, as a nation, thought through the ramifications of political correctness in practice.

What happened at Walter Reed? Did Hasan have an influential patron? If Hasan had exhibited certain disturbing tendencies, and if he was in fact being scrutinized by law enforcement, then what was achieved by moving him to Fort Hood, except putting distance between Hasan and whatever was in Washington DC? What hypothesis could cover so many disparate facts? Many questions remain unanswered. There’s not enough data yet to conclude anything. . . .

This investigation can go anywhere. There’s a great incentive to make sure that whatever the truth happens to be that those in officialdom who have the most to lose should not be the last to know.