Tag Archives: Fort Hood

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We should not be ignoring the continued threat of radical Islam

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I was surprised to find a strongly-worded article like this at the Christian web site Breakpoint, of all places.

Excerpt:

Overnight, following the inauguration of Barack Obama, problematic phrasing such as the “global war on terror” (itself a euphemism) and “Muslim extremism” were expunged from the national lexicon in favor of generic terms such as “man-caused disasters.” Explained Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, “We want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.”

[…][E]vents on the ground continue to belie the administration’s euphemisms, parsings, and happy talk. The grisly murder of a British soldier in broad daylight by two machete- and knife-wielding Muslims in London came within mere days. Yet the Obama administration remains committed to its narrative, which it knows to be untrue, and is more than willing to twist the facts to keep it going. Worse, the administration has done all this at the risk of American lives and security. Let’s go down the short list:

Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan faces the death penalty or life without parole if convicted on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in his 2009 rampage. Hasan, who shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great!”) during the attack against his unarmed fellow soldiers, now says he was defending the Taliban. U.S. prosecutors are treating the bloodletting as an incident of “workplace violence,” denying victims both Purple Hearts and certain combat-related medical benefits. Hasan, meanwhile, is preparing to defend himself in a court of law.

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scribbled a message on the boat in which he was captured that said the Americans killed were collateral damage in U.S. wars in Muslim lands, and that an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all. The FBI, of course, failed to prevent his butchery, which killed three people and wounded 275, even after a warning from Russian intelligence about the Tsarnaev brothers.

Then of course there is Benghazi. Seeking to maintain the pre-election fiction that the drone-happy President Obama had al Qaeda on the run (“The tide of war is receding,” the president told the U.N.), the administration ignored months of warnings from Ambassador Chris Stevens and others about inadequate security at the U.S. consulate and the strengthening of Islamist forces in Libya. On September 11, Islamists linked to al Qaeda launched a coordinated assault on the consulate, killing four Americans, including Stevens. (Many more would have died if two former Navy SEALs had not disobeyed orders and rescued consulate staff.) Despite repeated calls to Washington for help and a rescue team that was ready to intervene, that night administration officials did nothing.

And in the following weeks, they promulgated the lie that the assault was not an attack of Islamist terror but a “spontaneous demonstration” in response to a YouTube video. Adding insult to injury, Barack Obama has just selected the discredited U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, who repeated the administration lie on numerous Sunday morning talk shows, to be his next national security adviser. Why not, since the bigger lie about the threat we face from radicalized Islam continues?

I was surprised to see so direct an article posted on Breakpoint. It shocked me more than when the Gospel Coalition interviewed old-Earth design theorist Stephen C. Meyer about his new book on the Cambrian explosion. It’s just so encouraging to see Christians rolling up their sleeves and applying their worldview to areas like science and foreign policy. The fact is, we do have to care about this issues, because Christian applies to every area of our lives. It’s not about feeling comfortable in our own hearts by having a private notion of Christianity that is just for our benefit. We should be letting Christian truth claims seep into every area of our lives, so that we continue to promote the good in every area, for everyone. Naturally, we have to study more in order to know how to achieve the good in every area. Some areas like economics and foreign policy are complicated, and not much fun for us, if our goal is personal happiness and comfort. But I think that’s what were are supposed to be doing – learning the truth about God, and then applying it out there in the real world. It’s OK for Christians to study up on these areas and have an informed opinion about them. It’s OK to speak out on these issues, too. We need more of that.

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Obama administration covers up political correctness that led to massacre

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From Hans Bader, at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Discrimination and politically-correct blinders can be deadly. It was obvious in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings that the killer was inspired by Islamic extremism. Obvious, that is, to anyone but officials in the Obama administration, who continue to cling tightly to a culture of political correctness and preferential treatment that helped make the shootings possible.

Nidal Hasan shot dead 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”  But the Obama administration’s inquiry into the shootings falsely suggested Islamic extremism was not a factor in the shootings.  Its report on the Fort Hood massacre did not even “mention the words ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ once,” referring to the killer simply as the “alleged perpetrator.” Instead, it claimed the tragedy resulted from “bureaucratic shortcomings” in the “sharing of information.”

[…]The shooter’s Islamic extremism was obvious.  Prior to the shooting, he had said that Muslims should rise up against the military, “repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers,” was pleased by the terrorist murder of an army recruiter, and engaged in hate-speech against non-Muslims, publicly calling for the beheading or burning of non-Muslims, and talking “about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire.”  “In addition, Hasan openly had suggested revenge as a defense for the 9/11 attacks, defended Osama bin Laden, and said his allegiance to his religion was greater than his allegiance to the constitution.”

But the military did nothing to remove him from a position where he could harm others. Although his views were common knowledge, “a fear of appearing discriminatory . . . kept officers from filing a formal written complaint,” the Associated Press noted. Moreover, “a key official on a review committee reportedly asked how it might look to terminate a key resident who happened to be a Muslim,” as NPR noted.  Instead, the military effectively exempted Hasan from rules of conduct that apply to everyone else, in order to promote its conception of “diversity.”

As military attorney Thomas Kenniff notes, there was a climate of “obsessive political correctness” in the military. As Major Shawn Keller pointed out, in a column entitled “An Officer’s Outrage Over Fort Hood.” “There was no shortage of warning signs that Hasan identified more with Islamic Jihadists than he did with the US Army. . .But just like September 11, those agencies and individuals charged with keeping America and Americans safe failed to connect the dots that would have saved lives. Jihadist rhetoric espoused by Hasan was categorically dismissed out of submissiveness to the concepts of tolerance and diversity. . . . the leaders in Hasan’s chain-of-command failed to act . . . out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim and receiving a negative evaluation report.”

Indeed, even after the shootings, government officials worried more about the fate of “diversity” than about the lives of their troops:  “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength,” Army Chief of Staff George Casey told NBC’s Meet the Press. “And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,” Casey said.

Can you trust the Democrats on national security? I don’t see why.

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How the British government funds radical Islam

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Story from National Review. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The East London Mosque is one of the largest and most influential of Islamic institutions in Britain. It has a Muslim Centre, a meeting place which acts a bit like a college, offering lectures and sermons at which like-minded people may meet. One who gave lectures there was Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Islamist imam whose fingerprints have turned up in more than one place. He groomed Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, and we now learn that the Detroit would-be bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab, while a student in London between 2005 and 2008 listened to a number of video-link lectures given by al-Awlaki at this mosque’s Muslim Centre. By then, al-Awlaki was communicating at long distance from Yemen where he had taken refuge, and become affiliated to al-Qaeda. And when Abdul Mutallab himself went to Yemen where he was trained and equipped as a suicide bomber, he had personal contact with al-Awlaki, evidently his mentor.

The authorities ought to have been able to pick this up. Far worse than their laxity, however, is the fact that in the past two years, according to the Sunday Telegraph, the Muslim Centre has received at least 60,000 pounds from a government initiative known as Preventing Violent Extremism. The intention is to fund moderates to oppose extremists, but the very opposite has happened. Violent extremism has been subsidized. In the last two years, al-Awlaki has addressed at least two gatherings at the Centre via video-link, including one last year called “The End of Time,” advertised with a poster showing the destruction of New York.

This is why you don’t elect secular leftists from the British Labour Party to run national security.