When Political Correctness Kills

Dorothy Rabinowitz on the Fort Hood killer: "His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass."

It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice. . . .

. . . To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.

One of the first outbreaks of these fevers, the night of the shootings, featured television's star psychologist, Dr. Phil, who was outraged when fellow panelist and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff observed that he had been listening to a lot of psychobabble and evasions about Maj. Hasan's motives.

A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan's Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes? . . .

The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked us to consider, "how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act." And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan's proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous.

To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred—the sort of mindset that regularly eludes the Dr. Phils of our world as the motive for mass murder of this kind.

Read the whole thing for a discussion of the diverse ways the obvious was ignored. Ans this is one of the main reasons why the obvious was so studiously ignored:

"This terrible event," Gen. Casey noted, "would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty."

To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.

Charles Krauthammer:

I think the real moral scandal is the attempt over the weekend to medicalize mass murder. All of a sudden we hear that he [Nidal Hasan] heard these terrible stories from soldiers who had suffered and he snapped. . . .

I was a psychiatrist. I can't remember a single instance of a psychiatrist who went around shooting people. Maybe I missed the epidemic.

But all of a sudden if the shooter is called Nidal Hasan, all of a sudden everybody invents this secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome which had never existed until yesterday.

It is an example of political correctness. And all the warnings that people had had in advance and not reported is an example of how political correctness isn't only a moral abomination, it's also a danger.

Jonah Goldberg comparing the woman who said nothing when threatened by Mohammed Atta before 9/11 vs. the failure of anyone to "connect the dots" concerning Hassan:

When my wife was up for a job at the Justice Department, her background-checker grilled her relentlessly over the fact she once had a reduction in her rent by $100 a month. It was as if this proved she had a gambling problem, or credit issues, or was a sleeper agent for the Bulgarian KGB or something.

Apparently, the FBI’s investigation of Hasan was not that thorough. When the FBI “investigated,” it seems they went looking for a reason not to investigate — and they found it.

Much more in the article.

Bill Bennett on the investigations concerning Fort Hood vs. Tailhook:

More and more information continues to come out about Nidal Hasan and the Ft. Hood massacre. As I surmised, memos will be released and institutions or institutional officers will not look good. Already some of this is coming out. This needs to be bigger than the 1991 Tailhook incident which dominated the news for a year, I fear that it will not be. You may recall the Tailhook scandal involved a party of Navy personnel where tens of women and men complained of sexual harassment by fellow servicemen and women. Nobody, however, was killed. 4,000 male military attendees were interviewed several times, many as much as five times or more, and heads rolled. I want the same thing here — I fear the story ends in a month.