PrintNovember 9, 2009
Jihad and America: The Land that Cried Sheep
People were shocked when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan brutally targeted fellow servicemen at Texas' Fort Hood with pistol fire, murdering 12 and wounding 31. Yet there is an aspect of this story that is far more shocking -- or at least, one that would be considered so in a sane society.
We now know that Major Hasan did not hide his true loyalties and often expressed Islamist sentiments. For example, the Telegraph quotes former Hasan colleague Col. Terry Lee as saying, "[Hasan] was making outlandish comments condemning our foreign policy and claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans"; that Hasan admitted to being "happy" upon learning of the Muslim who killed a soldier at an Arkansas military recruitment center; and that he once said, "maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Time Square." Chron.com reports that Hasan had created "Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats," and that "one of the Web postings that authorities reviewed is a blog that equates suicide bombers with a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades."
Given this, was it really shocking when Hasan walked among the "aggressors" and yelled Allahu Akbar before punctuating his story with a burst of violence?
It wasn't to me. You see, I knew the rough details of the event as soon as I heard about the shooting. I knew that there are jihadists among us; I knew the perpetrator was likely one of them; and I knew that a three-little-monkeys society, blinded, deafened, and dumbed down by political correctness, is allowing this fifth column to operate unfettered. I knew it not because I'm a genius but because I'm willing to profile -- also known as seeing reality as it is, not as fashions dictate it must be. And this brings us to what is most shocking.
Why was an obvious jihadist in our military in the first place, let alone promoted to major?
Well, the question has already been answered. We have become a sick society, where fantasies are favored and reality is called "racist." If there were an officer of Japanese descent in our military during WWII, he wouldn't have lasted til the next day's rising sun if he had expressed pro-Imperial Japanese sentiments. But that was then, when America was America, before she was sacrificed on the altar of the leftist dystopia in utopian clothing.
Furthermore, only a sick society would tolerate a far more dangerous fifth column: those traitors who, as Cicero said 2,000 years ago, appear not as traitors, who speak in accents familiar to their victims, who wear their victims' face and use their arguments. I speak of those who wasted no time painting Hasan as a victim: writers such as Kenyon Wallace, who only emphasized the claim that the major was "harassed" by colleagues and theorized that post-traumatic stress disorder might have influenced this man who never saw a firefight until he started one at Fort Hood.
What bunk. Sure, Hasan got into heated arguments with fellow officers and was called names. But that's not called harassment. Harassment is when you disgorge the enemy's rhetoric with a violent tongue. It's called a defense of God, country, and culture. It's called pushing back when pushed.
Yet however much some individuals push, we are a society of three little monkeys, content with their self-imposed handicaps. Is it noteworthy that Islamists perpetrated 9/11, that we are at war with them, and that they have spread their creed primarily by the sword ever since Islam's inception nigh on 1,400 years ago? Is it noteworthy that they perpetrated the aforementioned Arkansas murder; that Sgt. Asan Akbar attacked members of his own American unit in Kuwait with grenades and a gun in 2003; and that, as WorldNetDaily.com reports citing a recent book, "jihadists fill 'every branch'" of the U.S. military? Is it noteworthy that virtually all of today's terrorism is Islamist handiwork, from New York to Nigeria, France to the Philippines, India to Israel? Is this not a pattern?
Yet the powers that be still pretend that fitting an obvious, consistently demonstrated profile is meaningless and trumped by facile propositions such as "He is a soldier sworn to duty," "He is an 'American' with freedom of speech and religion," and the worn-out "Islam is a religion of peace" and "Most Muslims are good people." And their attitude much reminds me of an old Mad Magazine cartoon I read as a boy. It was a depiction of two men observing a huge, octopus-like monster holding a colleague in one tentacle, a fork and knife in two others and dangling salt and pepper shakers over the man's head with another two. One of the men then asks the other (I'm paraphrasing), "What makes you think this creature intends to eat Dr. Toms?"
Ah, the beauty of tolerance and open-mindedness. Pay no attention to the turbaned man behind the curtain. It's them thar racists clingin' to guns and religion (other than Islam) you've got to worry about.
I could leave it there, but this issue warrants a deeper treatment. So let's examine the last two propositions I mentioned.
Religion isn't peaceful by definition any more than is ideology. For much of history, for instance, most religions prescribed human sacrifice; the norm was not "Love thy neighbor" but more likely "Eat thy neighbor." Of course, such values are no longer the stuff of mainstream religion, but values in general still are. And that is the point.
Having lost their faith and sound philosophical foundation, modern people love embracing religious-equivalency doctrine (a cousin of multiculturalism), which states that all religions are morally equal. But since different religions espouse different values, not all religions can be morally equal unless all values are so (which is moral relativism). And unless we're willing to cast a critical eye upon a faith's values, we can't know if it's peaceful or not.
Also note that the relativism at the heart of religious-equivalency doctrine renders it self-defeating. After all, the doctrine is designed to yield tolerance and peaceful coexistence. But if all values are equal, how could tolerance be better than intolerance? How could peacefulness be better than barbarity?
Then there is the statement that most Muslims are good people, that it's the radicals who have hijacked Islam. But while I won't deny that they're good people practically speaking, I will ask if they're Muslims theologically speaking. Remember that many in the West practice their faith in only a nominal fashion, and such cafeteria religionists are much more likely to reflect the values of the wider society than those of their ostensible faith. Only true believers "reject this world" -- for good or for ill.
This brings us to the question: Who has hijacked what? As an example, most American Catholics accept artificial birth control, but this doesn't mean their view is Church teaching, no matter how much the secular world calls them "moderate." Radicals may be wrong or right -- Karl Marx was a radical, as was the first abolitionist -- and they may be bad or good. But whatever they are, they are often the ones who truly represent their creed.
Of course, I haven't demonstrated here that Islam is or isn't peaceful. This is because my message is more basic: We must wake up, open our eyes, dispense with childish relativism, and judge all men's beliefs -- not just ideology but also culture and religion -- under the light of Truth. Then we'll know the difference between friend and foe.
And our biggest threat is those shepherds who make us easy prey, who speak in familiar accents and who wear our face and our arguments and say, "Go back to sleep, baby, that wolf was just a bad dream. All creatures are sheep, don't you know?"
America, how many tears must we shed before we stop crying sheep?
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