When a military officer participates in a war against his own country, that is high treason, and that is the charge that ought to be brought against Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. But it’s not going to happen. Hasan should have been weeded out of the military long ago. There was abundant evidence that his allegiance was not to the United States — the country that had given his immigrant family safe haven and provided him the opportunity to become, at taxpayer expense, a physician, an officer, and a gentleman. It was apparent that he had come to view himself not as an American soldier but as a “Soldier of Allah” — the phrase he had printed on his business cards — and that sooner or later he would wage war against the “unbelievers.”

Why did none of those who saw something say something? In a culture where the value of diversity trumps the requirements of security, to do so would have been career suicide. There was no way that was going to happen. Let’s be clear: The lesson of Fort Hood is not that Muslims in the U.S. military are a fifth column. But neither can we continue to blithely assume that someone like Hasan — American-born, well-educated, apparently sophisticated — could never succumb to the temptations of what the politically correct call “violent extremism.”

Paradoxically, the Fort Hood massacre highlights the fact that Muslim soldiers who are doing their duty as proud, patriotic Americans are extraordinarily independent-minded and brave. Because while there is no evidence that Hasan was ever harassed for being a Muslim — as some of his relatives have charged — there is a long record of Muslims who criticize Islamists being denounced as apostates — a sin that can bring a fatwa and the death penalty. “Patriotism is paganism,” the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously said. Khomeini was a Shia Islamist, but on this theological point Sunni Islamists emphatically agree.

Out of ignorance or wishful thinking, Western commentators sometimes assert that Muslims who preach intolerance and belligerence are “heretics” who have “hijacked” a great and peaceful religion. But no Muslim authority would say that — not even those who denounce terrorism. How, after all, can a fundamentalist be a heretic? How can someone who insists on a literal reading of the Koran be accused of misrepresenting what it says? Some Western commentators also assert that there is a “civil war” taking place within “the Muslim world.” It would be simpler and more encouraging if that were the case.

In reality, there are the many Muslims who look upon the West with disfavor but would not sacrifice themselves and their families to destroy it. They may even live in the West — enjoying the opportunities and freedoms the West provides. A second faction, small but deadly, do act on the conviction that Christians and Jews are vermin. They become what they call jihadis, holy warriors — revolutionaries on a mission from God, no hyperbole intended.

A third faction chooses to interpret their religion in a moderate, tolerant way and integrate it into the modern world, alongside the other great religions. But only a very small number are activists who put their lives on the line by publicly challenging the fascistic reading of Islam championed by Iran’s rulers, the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Wahhabi clerics. Continue to Clifford D May's article in the National Review

On his recent trip to Asia, President Obama found China, Japan, and South Korea — like many nations these days — in no mood to hear more American lectures. Beijing is worried about owning so much American debt. Tokyo is tiring of an American military base in Okinawa, and wants to redefine its relationship with us. Seoul is starting to doubt American commitment to keep it safe from North Korea.

Why all the sudden pushback to our charismatic president? Our dollar is crashing, while the price of gold is soaring. The budget deficit has never been worse — and the president wants to float even more debt for health-care and energy initiatives. By the end of this presidential term, we may add another $9 trillion to our already astronomical $11 trillion debt. Unemployment has already topped 10 percent. This quarter’s trade deficit reached a near-historic high. Our debtors and oil exporters talk of scrapping the dollar as the common international currency.

American hesitation abroad reflects the shaky economic news. In Afghanistan, we can’t decide whether to seek victory or admit defeat — or simply vote present by keeping the status quo. President Obama reached out to enemies such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. But so far they remain unimpressed, despite his apologizing for an assortment of supposed past American sins. The Chinese don’t listen all that much anymore to our sermons on their human-rights, coal-burning, and free-trade abuses — not when they hold $1.5 trillion in U.S. assets. The president took a lot of flak for bowing to Saudi royals and the Japanese emperor. But why wouldn’t he show deference — given America’s huge dependence on foreign oil and Japanese imports?

France, of all nations, is now warning us to get a backbone with the Iranians. So far the theocracy has snubbed our new outreach efforts aimed at stopping its nuclear proliferation. Iran’s Russian patrons now talk more nicely to us — but mostly because we caved on land-based missile defense in Eastern Europe, and got nothing really in return. The Norwegians gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize after less than a year in office and without any real accomplishments. They must suspect that such global recognition will flatter Obama to push a now-unexceptional America toward a more multilateral perspective in tune with the thinking at the United Nations.

The Obama administration announced a kinder, gentler approach to the War on Terror. It serially promised to the world to shut down Guantanamo and loudly derided much of the Bush-era anti-terrorism protocols. We may put on trial former CIA interrogators, while we give civil trials and full American legal protection to the terrorist detainees who planned the 9/11 attacks. Continue to Victor Davis Hanson's article in the National Review

The liberal writ was that a strutting “bring ’em on” George W. Bush for eight years did what he pleased on the international scene. His “unilateral” America supposedly did not consult with either allies or international organizations, as he rammed through democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush’s “my way or the highway” personal credo resulted in an America alone. Obama, of course, was hailed as the multifaceted antidote to all that. The new nontraditional America would reach out to the world. We would now listen rather than lecture. This was a welcome reflection of Barack Obama’s own cool and tolerant approach to politics, learned as a seasoned community organizer in Chicago.

But things have not quite worked out as planned. Barack Obama to all appearances is certainly more relaxed than Bush. And he resonates abroad as a nontraditional American. Indeed, Obama is now the paradigm of America’s ongoing metamorphosis into something more like the rest of the planet. Yet in his own way Obama projects a far more prissy, self-indulgent America than we had under Bush. And that self-centeredness seems a logical extension of the new commander-in-chief himself.

How can that be, given Obama’s well-known apologies — for everything from slavery and our treatment of Native Americans to being imperious toward Europeans and Muslims? In obsequious fashion, we have sought to assure the Russians that we won’t deploy anti-ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Obama has reminded the Chinese that they enjoy sovereignty over Taiwan. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, the Castro brothers, Hugo Chávez, and assorted other old enemies of the United States are suddenly considered either neutrals or friends.

It seems counterintuitive, then, to suggest that Obama’s America is increasingly self-absorbed.

GLOBAL PENITENT
But consider first the nature of his apologies. America deigns to apologize to Muslims without much mention of a murderous Islamic radicalism that almost daily fuels a terrorist attack on some portion of the world’s civilian population.

Left unsaid by the global penitent is that Russia flattened Grozny and butchered hundreds of thousands of Chechens in serial wars. No need to talk of the absorption of Tibet by China or of the 70 million Chinese who were killed or starved to death under Mao. Will the adjudicator Obama not say who was at fault in Rwanda, who needs to apologize — and how?

Obama is conflicted over Hiroshima, but not so much over the millions of Chinese, Koreans, Australians, British, and Americans who were slaughtered by the legions of the Co-Prosperity Sphere — and were desperate to find a way to stop Japanese militarism. The point is this: When Obama takes it upon himself to adjudicate, in quite ahistorical fashion, who is culpable and who not, the resulting verdicts are consistent only in terms of the president’s own Chicago-style race/class/gender politics.

Detention in Guantanamo is Bush’s transgression against the Constitution, but the incineration of terrorists and their families by judge/jury/executioner Predator drones in Waziristan is Eric Holder’s approved cosmic justice. Continue to Victor Davis Hanson's article in the National Review...

President Obama's bow to Japan's Emperor Akihito was deeply insulting to the American people he was elected to represent. Sadly, it came as no surprise: For the past nine months, Obama has traveled around the world apologizing for America's alleged multitude of past sins and errors. These mea culpas have been delivered to nations ruled by corrupt authoritarians (Egypt), terrorist-supporting monarchs (Saudi Arabia) and virulently anti-Semitic despots (Iran), among so many others. He has even apologized to countries in Europe that might not exist in anything remotely like their current form were it not for the repeated shedding of American blood on their soil.

So seeing Obama obsequiously bowing and scraping to the head of state of the nation that launched the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor doesn't exactly come as a shock. But it is no less egregious for not being unexpected.

It simply ought not be necessary to instruct an American chief executive -- even one so inexperienced in foreign affairs as Obama was when he took the oath of office -- that we do not bow to foreign monarchs. We declared our independence from a monarch. As Thomas Paine put it, "in America, the law is king." And the law is made by representatives chosen by the true sovereign, the people. A bow is far more than a diplomatic expression of respect; it is a sign of submission and acceptance of the authority of the monarch. For an American president to make such a gesture rightfully has sparked outrage across the country.

Recognizing that Obama's bow was inappropriate, most of the Japanese news media used images of the president's more formal nod to the Empress. Japan has depended upon the U.S. nuclear umbrella for decades and has looked to this nation for strong, steady leadership in a dangerous world. As a result, the Japanese have been able to redirect precious resources that would otherwise have gone to its defense against threats from the Soviet Union, North Korea and China toward the pursuit of peace and economic stability. They understand -- apparently better than some of our own leaders here at home -- that a weakened America creates immense problems for them.

So stop the bowing and apologizing, Mr. President. We elected you to stand up for us, not to make apologies for us or to demean the accomplishments and sacrifices of our ancestors. Editors-Washington Examiner

President Obama, who nearly prostrated himself before the king of Saudi Arabia last April, has once again bowed low to a monarch — this time, to the emperor of Japan. What to make of this obsequious body language? After the presidential frame went perpendicular before the Saudi royal, the White House at first denied that the president had bowed. He was merely leaning over, Robert Gibbs explained, because the president was “taller than the king.” That might make sense — to anyone who had not seen the video. President Obama bent so far over that he was at eye level with the king’s hips.

The president’s defenders suggested that he was merely being polite, or simply following protocol. Politeness consists in treating others with respect and taking care not to hurt their feelings. But a bow, well, that’s a different matter. Last week the president did it again, bowing from the waist before Japan’s Emperor Akihito. So what might have seemed a rookie mistake is now looking deliberate.

Protocol is not the explanation. While there have been exceptions, American presidents have not traditionally bowed to royalty. Nor have American diplomats or citizens of any stripe. Kings and queens of England have visited America and been quite satisfied to receive a dignified handshake from Americans high and low. President Roosevelt famously served Great Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth hot dogs at his Hyde Park home.

When it comes to body language, it’s best to stick to your own culture and traditions. A too eager attempt to ingratiate by adopting others’ customs can backfire. According to one expert on Asia consulted by ABC’s Jake Tapper, Obama’s low bow caused considerable consternation in Japan. Apparently, a proper Japanese bow under the circumstances would have been executed with hands at the sides, and a slight tilt from the waist. “The bow as he performed it did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms. . . . The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak-looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.”

President Obama makes much of his international pedigree, the latest iteration being the boast that he is the “first Pacific president” — whatever that means. But when he stoops to royalty this way, he invites the question: How American does he feel?Don’t hyperventilate. Of course there is no one way for Americans to think or feel. But some American attitudes are, or used to be, woven deeply into our character. Most Americans have a visceral distaste, dating back to our founding, for truckling to royalty. Article One, Section 9 of the Constitution states: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: — And no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of Congress, accept any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” Kings and emperors have been treated with courtesy of course, but to bow is —yes, I’ll say it — un-American.

Here, let the New York Times explain it. In 1994, the Times gently rebuked President Clinton for “almost” bowing to the Japanese emperor. “It wasn’t a bow, exactly,” the editorial chided, “but Mr. Clinton came close. He inclined his head and shoulders forward, he pressed his hands together. It lasted no longer than a snapshot, but the image on the South Lawn was indelible: an obsequent President, and the Emperor of Japan. Canadians still bow to England’s Queen. So do Australians. Americans shake hands. If not to stand eye-to-eye with royalty, what else were 1776 and all that about?”

President Obama’s bows, coupled with his global apology tours, suggest something other than politeness. President Obama has repeatedly reminded us that he thinks we have been arrogant and high-handed in our dealings with other nations. By bowing and scraping, he intends to drop us down a peg or two. The president of the United States really did intend to show obeisance to the king of Saudi Arabia and to defer to the emperor of Japan. He appears to have done so not to flatter those nations, but only to diminish his own. Mona Charen in the National Review

Obama was playing it safe. He had hold of the Emperor's hand so he would not fall flat on his face. That would have been a international incident, of course he is already a international joke since he elected himself "President of the Pacific". A little traveling, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. Barack Obama on the loose in a foreign land is enough to frighten protocol officers and embarrass the rest of us.

He went off to Asia to tell the Chinese a thing or two about world trade, to prepare the world for a treaty to make the sun change its spots, and of course to pay his respects to assorted heads of state, with particular attention to any royal head (perhaps even including Miss Universe) who crosses his path.

So far it's a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue's gallery showing how other national leaders - the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them - have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).

Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he's strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with. Some of the president's critics are giving him a hard time, and it's true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog, with ballpark mustard, to the king and queen of England? John F. Kennedy, on the eve of a trip to London, sharply warned Jackie not to curtsy to the queen.

Douglas MacArthur, who ranked above mere heads of state in his own mind, once invented his own protocol on greeting Emperor Hirohito. The emperor, the father of Akihito, wanted to meet MacArthur soon after he arrived to become the military regent of Japan in 1945, perhaps to thank him for saving the throne at the end of World War II. When the emperor invited MacArthur to call on him, the general sent word that the emperor should call on him - speaking of breaches of custom - and the two men were photographed together, astonishing the Japanese. The emperor arrived in full formal dress, cutaway coat and all, and MacArthur received him in summer khakis, sans tie, with his hands stuffed casually in his back pockets. Further astonishing the Japanese, he towered over the diminutive emperor.

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to "hope" for "change." It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of "the 57 states" is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

He no doubt wants to "do the right thing" by his lights, but the lights that illumine the Obama path are not necessarily the lights that illuminate the way for most of the rest of us. This is good news only for Jimmy Carter, who may yet have to give up his distinction as our most ineffective and embarrassing president. Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times

Shortly after 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how no one would ever hijack an American airliner ever again — not because of new security arrangements but because an alert citizenry was on the case: We were hip to their jive. The point appeared to be proved three months later on a U.S.-bound Air France flight. The “Shoebomber” attempted to light his footwear, and the flight attendants and passengers pounced. As the more boorish commentators could not resist pointing out, even the French guys walloped him.

But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Maj. Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK.” But we (that is to say, almost all of us — and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests,” so there was no need to worry. That’s America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two “joint terrorism task forces” stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken.

On the other hand, who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Major Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: “SOA.” As in “Soldier of Allah” — which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical-school education to train him to be a Soldier of Uncle Sam. In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then-captain Hasan was psychotic. But, according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered “How would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents?” So he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood.

And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.

Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently he tried to contact al-Qaeda,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al-Qaeda, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?

The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. George Casey, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles,” “an acceptable level of violence.” Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out. Continue here to Mark Steyn's article in full......

I recently taped and am watching a documentary, "The Crusades: Crescent and the Cross," on the History Channel. While it is more or less historically accurate—names, dates, figures—it suffers from two weaknesses, weaknesses that often take center stage whenever Islam is discussed in the West: 1) biases and apologetics on behalf of Islam, coupled with outright distortions concerning Christians and Christianity; and 2) anachronisms, by projecting the motives and worldview of modern man onto the motives and worldview of pre-modern man, both Muslims and Christians.

Take the first 10 minute segment, dealing with Pope Urban II’s call to the Crusades, including the famous Council of Clermont (1095) where Urban made his case. Urban is repeatedly portrayed as a sly politician wholly indifferent to Christianity and faith, simply interested in aggrandizing his power and authority.

Incidentally, we are never told how Islam “spread”—that Jerusalem (not to mention practically the entire Muslim world today) was ruthlessly conquered—even by the enthusiastic narrator who speaks with somber awe whenever touching upon Muslim prowess. Instead, the narrator informs us that the encroachment of the Turks upon Byzantium was “the perfect opportunity [for Urban] to enhance his political power.” And of course, the “historians” interviewed all agree.

The “British-Pakistani” Muslim historian, Tariq Ali, is repeatedly quoted as something of the final authority on the Crusades in this documentary. Sitting there pompously, he nonchalantly informs us that, if the popes were anything, they were “scheming, manipulating, intriguing” persons, always out to exploit.

So what if it is a historical fact, especially after the battle of Manzikert (1071, a little more than two decades before Urban’s call to the crusades), that the Muslim armies were conquering more Christian land and increasingly terrorizing and persecuting Christians? Or that the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim had recently desecrated and destroyed a number of important churches—such as the Church of St. Mark in Egypt and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—and decreed several, even more oppressive than usual, decrees against Christians and Jews? It is in this backdrop that Pope Urban called for the Crusades: Continue to Raymond Ibrahim's article in full......

With billions in cost overruns and unpaid loans, Malaysia's Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) is a mega venture gone wrong. 101 East investigates a billion dollar land scandal linked to an international ...



Another Malaysia Boleh event, "Corruption and Cover Ups" by the politicians and their cronies. All right thinking Malaysians must watch this, to see how these robber barons rob you of your tax dollars.

Let me say up front, I don’t think President Obama is to blame for the Fort Hood shootings, and I don’t think it’s fair to say otherwise. But (you knew there had to be a “but”) that doesn’t mean Obama won’t pay a political price for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage.

At first blush, it seems distasteful to take a political yardstick to the pain suffered at Fort Hood. But if we are to consider this incident part of the bloody tapestry of the larger war on terror, there’s no way to separate it from politics. After all, the war on terror has been driving politics in America for the better part of a decade now. And that might offer insight into why so many are eager to make the massacre a story about the psychological breakdown of a man who just happened to be a Muslim.

If this is just another incident where a deranged man went “postal” at his office, then there’s no reason to second-guess the Obama administration’s fairly relentless effort to dismantle the war on terror.

That effort stems from what Obama believes to be a sweeping mandate to be Not George Bush. In pursuit of that mandate, the White House has already purged the phrase “war on terror” from its lexicon, preferring “overseas contingency operations.” Obama is hell-bent on closing Guantanamo Bay, is making progress on the White House project to treat terrorists as mere criminals, and has kowtowed to the United Nations as no president has. Meanwhile, his secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, says that Islamic terrorism of the type we saw on 9/11 should now be referred to as “man-caused disasters.” But she adds that American right-wingers must be scrutinized as potential terrorists.

All of these moves seemed politically palatable for a war-weary country that felt, rightly or wrongly, as if we’d made it through the worst of it. It was time for a makeover of our political house. The problem is that, rather than merely throw on a fresh coat of paint and lay down some new carpeting, Obama is going after load-bearing walls and structural beams. And if the war on terror refuses to go away as easily as the phrase we use for it did, the whole edifice of the Obama administration could come crashing down.

For instance, it seems likely that Obama has already suffered a rhetorical defeat. Whatever his faults, President Bush got to say one thing that the American people always appreciated: After 9/11, he kept us safe from a terrorist attack on the homeland. If Hasan acted as a jihadist terrorist and not a disgruntled psychiatrist, Obama can’t even make the same claim about his first year in office.

More substantively, Obama has had the luxury of exploiting his predecessor’s success. His actions on Guantanamo, his mea culpas for America to the Muslim world, etc., have only been possible in a political environment absent domestic terrorist attacks. As it stands, Hasan may have been a one-off, an isolated incident. Let’s hope that’s the case, but let’s not delude ourselves that this is likely. Continue on to Jonah Goldberg's article in the National Review....

The FBI and other federal authorities are reportedly still trying to figure out Maj. Nidal M. Hasan’s motive for opening fire at Fort Hood.

Let’s take a look at Hasan’s June 2007 50-slide presentation, a must see to senior Army doctors to see if we can unravel this mystery. According to the Washington Post, Hasan was “supposed to discuss a medical topic during” the presentation, but instead “he lectured on Islam, suicide bombers and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting wars in Muslim countries.”

Hasan’s presentation was titled, “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” It is fairly obvious that Hasan endorsed the jihadist view of the world in which believers are rewarded, while the infidels are punished. And only those believers who truly follow Allah’s commandments will be rewarded in the afterlife. Allah’s demands, according to Hasan, included participation in an offensive jihad against Islam’s enemies.

On page 11, Hasan included this quote:

“It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”

Interestingly, Hasan’s words were echoed by al Qaeda cleric Anwar al Awlaki in his post (now offline) praising Hasan’s shooting spree. Awlaki said Hasan “is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against its own people.”continued here in full to the Weekly Standard.....

Two interpretations immediately sprung up to explain the Fort Hood massacre.The military leadership, politicians, the media, and the Left focused on poor Maj. Nidal Hasan, victim of — pick your specific — “racism,” “harassment he had received as a Muslim,” a sense of “not belonging,” “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” “mental problems,” “emotional problems,” “an inordinate amount of stress,” or being deployed to Afghanistan, his “worst nightmare.”

In contrast, those of us on the right saw the assault in the light of Islamist efforts to kill infidels and bring them under Islamic law. We perceive Hasan not as victim but as jihadi. Some evidence for this view:

He yelled “Allahu Akbar,” the jihadi’s cry, as he fired his guns.

His superiors reportedly put him on probation for inappropriately proselytizing about Islam.

One former associate quotes Hasan’s saying, “I’m a Muslim first and an American second,” and recalls Hasan justifying suicide terrorism.

Another recalls that Hasan “claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans.” A third described him as “almost belligerent about being Muslim.”

The jihad explanation may be more persuasive than the victim one, but it’s also far more awkward to articulate; easier to blame “a sense of not belonging” than to discuss Islamic doctrines. And so the Army learns no lessons from this atrocity. (For a full version of this argument, see article “Sudden Jihad or ‘Inordinate Stress’ at Fort Hood?”) More.....

So it turns out that the worst Islamist terrorist strike since 9/11 — an attack that killed twice as many Americans as were slain in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — was not a terrorist attack at all. Just ask the FBI.

The initial hurried reports of thirteen people (including twelve U.S. soldiers) murdered, and dozens of others wounded, were just coming in. A pained Diane Sawyer was wishing aloud that Nidal Malik Hasan were named “Smith.” Her colleagues in what now passes for mainstream journalism were risibly theorizing that post-traumatic stress disorder must have snapped this non-combat Army psychiatrist — one who’d screamed “Allahu akbar!” while mowing down U.S. soldiers about to deploy to a Muslim country for a war he’d made no secret of deploring; one whose only battlefield experience was the massacre he’d just committed against unarmed men and women in a Fort Hood training center.

Then, like the cavalry, the FBI came riding to the PC rescue. The Federal Bureau of Let’s Skip the Investigation pronounced that the killing was not terrorism. Forget about Islamic (or at least Islamist) terrorism. This mass murder wasn’t even terrorism. The FBI and the rest of our Islamophilic government have their story, and they’re sticking to it. The terrorists’ siege on our nation has nothing to do with Islam. It is the work of al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda terrorists — so the catechism goes — are not true Muslims. Sure, Osama bin Laden & Co. accurately quote Islamic scriptural injunctions to wage jihad against non-Muslims. But never mind that: Islam is an irenic, unmitigated good; in fact, it is one of our best weapons against terrorism.

Come again? If all the terrorists are Muslims and all the terrorists say scriptures that plainly command killing are inspiring them to kill, how could Islam be an asset? Don’t go spoiling a feel-good theory by asking a lot of questions — that would be almost like an investigation, and when it comes to Islam, the FBI doesn’t do investigation.

If it did, it might stumble onto all sorts of things we’d just as soon not know. We’d have to start acknowledging that Salafist ideology (the strain of Islam endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni terrorist organizations) is prevalent in American mosques. We’d have to concede that beliefs we optimistically call “radical” are actually quite mainstream among American Muslims and predominant among Muslims overseas — including the beliefs that sharia (the law of Islam) should govern the United States, that Muslims must resist American military and law-enforcement operations against other Muslims, that the U.S. military presence in Islamic countries renders American soldiers and those who support them legitimate targets of jihadist terror, and that Israel, America’s democratic ally in the Middle East, should not exist.

Obviously, this reality of Islam defies the government’s wishful fiction. So the FBI doesn’t do Islam. It does politics. And if you’re going to do politics, you can’t do preventive counterterrorism of the kind the FBI, the Justice Department, the Homeland Security Department, the intelligence community, and the rest of Leviathan promised to do right after 9/11. Continue here to Andrew C. McCarthy's article....

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 of his fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood, is a most unlikely victim of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

He never experienced any combat-related trauma. He had never even been deployed overseas. Yet he had barely stopped shooting his victims in cold blood, chasing the wounded to finish them off, when the media rushed to their copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The New York Times headlined an analysis piece on the incident “When Soldiers Snap.” It reported that in World War II, military doctors believed “that more than 90 days of continuous combat could turn any soldier into a psychiatric casualty.” With Hasan, the paper stipulated, “that point may have come even before he experienced the reality of war.”Time magazine blamed the stressful environment of Fort Hood where frequent deployments meant “the kindling was hiding in plain sight.” The Washington Post ran a piece on Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Hasan had served, as indicative of “the ongoing tensions, frustrations and problems in the military health-care system for [returning] troops.”

The press keeps mistaking Hasan for Private Ryan, when the closest he’d come to combat was counseling sessions with soldiers. Another New York Times piece raised the possibility that Hasan might have acquired PTSD from the very act of treating those patients — “in contact distress, of a kind.”

The obsession with PTSD serves two purposes. First, it fits the media’s favorite narrative of soldiers as victims. Here was poor Hasan, brought low like so many others by the unbearable burden of Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that PTSD usually results in sleeplessness, flashbacks, and — in the extreme — suicide. Hasan is the first victim of PTSD known to jump on a table and allegedly yell “Allahu Akbar” while slaughtering his fellow troops.

Two, it elides uncomfortable questions about Hasan’s dual loyalty. He appears to have been most “stressed” by the tension he felt between his obligations as a devout Muslim — as he understood them — and his service in the American military.

Put aside his ongoing contact with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, formerly a leader of Hasan’s mosque. A classmate of Hasan’s in a master’s program said Hasan told other students he was “a Muslim first and an American second.” Hasan titled a PowerPoint presentation he gave in an environmental-health seminar a year ago “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam.” According to one witness, he said he thought Muslims should “stand up and fight against the aggressor,” i.e., us. Continue to Rich Lowry's article here......

Surprise, surprise — that somebody who shouts "Allahu Akbar" as he shoots up a room of soldiers might have Islamist motives in doing that. 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. Well, what about the doctors and nurses and counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed who every day hear and live with the suffering of soldiers? How many of them have picked up a gun and shot up a room of soldiers?

What about civilian psychiatrists who hear every day tales of woe and suffering — the indescribable suffering of, say, a psychotically depressed patient — who don't pick up a gun and shoot up people.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. Source.....

The Department of Homeland Security is in good company in its confusion. Gen. George Casey, the Army’s top general, also worried that “this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that.” And President Obama cautioned against “jumping to conclusions.”

The backlash trope is trotted out after every episode of terrorist violence. But it is as false as it is dangerous. This image of a nation on a hair trigger for violence against Muslims is a calumny. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, though millions were inflamed by grief and outrage, there was no broad-based “backlash” against Muslim Americans. There were a handful of crimes, including the murder of a Sikh who may have been mistaken for a Muslim, a few broken windows, some insults, and some hurt feelings. But the overwhelming majority of Americans did not seek out scapegoats, nor engage in vigilantism.

The repeated invocation of this libel has had an effect, though. It has succeeded in intimidating many Americans about the proper bounds of discussion. General Casey reinforces this timidity when he frets that “our diversity” may be a casualty of the attack at Fort Hood. He and the Obama administration are obscuring the real challenge Americans face.

Our challenge is not to transcend the demons of vengeance clawing at our souls. Our challenge is to deal intelligently with a threat that arises from religious convictions. Non-bigoted observers can see that while the vast majority of the world’s Muslims are not extremists, a significant minority are. And it matters what people believe. We don’t like to pass judgment on others’ religious convictions. That’s fine. But when a religious belief spurs violence and mass murder, it becomes political, and it becomes a proper concern of the military and security services.

Worldwide, Muslims believing themselves to be advancing the faith have committed more than 14,000 acts of violence just since 9/11. You know the litany: Madrid, London, Bali, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Amman. The list is long and bloody — and it includes many innocent Muslims. Many hit home. In 2003, Hasan Akbar, a Muslim convert, rolled a grenade into the tent of his fellow soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. In June, Abdulhakim Muhammad, another convert, killed one Army recruiter and wounded another in Little Rock. Naveed Haq shot six women at the Seattle Jewish Federation office in 2006.

Federal agents have thwarted planned terror attacks on Fort Dix, N.J., folded up a terror ring in Lackawanna, N.Y., and uncovered plots against the nation’s financial centers, the World Bank, the Sears Tower, the New York subway system, the Los Angeles airport, the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, ten airliners landing in the U.S. (the liquid-bomb plot), JFK airport, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Prudential Building in Newark, N.J., among others. Continue here to Mona Charen's article....

Muhammed, 48, was killed by lethal injection at 9.11pm EST (0211 GMT) for a three-week killing spree in 2002 that left 10 dead. Prison spokesman Larry Traylor said Muhammad had no final words and did not utter a word while he was preparing to be executed. Hours earlier he had met with relatives and his lawyer described him as fearless in the face of death. J. Wyndal Gordon said Muhammad had no regrets and would die with dignity. Mr Gordon also insisted that Muhammad was innocent.

Mr Gordon said Muhammad met with one of his sons before the execution and then reminisced about the time he spent with his son before Muhammad went to prison. Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat, declined to stay the execution of Muhammad, a former US Army soldier, following the United States Supreme court's similar decision on Monday. Muhammad has no further avenues of appeal.

He his accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, now 24, terrorised the Washington area, killing 10 people in a three-week period before they were arrested. Using a battered car as a firing platform, they selected their targets at random and shot them at long rage. Under Virginia law, a condemned man may select whether to die by the electric chair or lethal election. Muhammad, who was born John Allen Williams but changed his name when he converted to Islam, declined to choose and officials therefore decided on the injection method.

His execution, for the single murder of Dean Meyers, 58, shot while buying petrol, took place at Greensville Correctional Centre near Jarrett, Virginia. Officials said Muhammad would be injected with thipental sodium, to put him to sleep, pancuronium bromide, to stop him breathing, and potassium chloride, to stop his heart. After their arrests, police established that the pair were also responsible for five other murders in Washington state, Arizona, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. But Malvo, who is serving a life sentence, confessed to four additional shootings, including two murders.

Cheryll Witz is one of several victims' relatives who were going to watch the execution. Malvo confessed that, at Muhammad's direction, he shot her father, Jerry Taylor, on a golf course in Tucson, Arizona in March 2002. "He basically watched my dad breathe his last breath," she said. "Why shouldn't I watch his last breath?" The very broad area of the confirmed attacks means that a number of other shootings are considered as potentially linked to Muhammad and Malvo. Some of the relatives of those possible victims fear that Muhammad will take to his grave the secret of whether he was responsible for the murders of their loved ones.

Sarah Dillon, whose son Billy Gene Dillon, 37, was shot dead outside a house in Texas in May 2002 has written to Muhammad and Malvo asking for confirmation or denial of their involvement but received no reply. The Texas authorities sent bullet fragments to the sniper task force but tests were inconclusive. Mrs Dillon said: "All I'm asking for is answers before they leave this world."

Several relatives are due to witness the execution. Among them is Marion Lewis, 57, of Mountain Home, Idaho, whose daughter Lori Lewis Rivera was shot dead by Muhammad and Malvo - who pulled the trigger is not known - at a petrol station in Kensington, Maryland. He is being flown to Virginia by a syndicated television show and told The Washington Post he was looking forward to seeing the death penalty imposed.

"I want to see what he made me see. He forced us to look at our little girl laying in a coffin. I want to see justice done. I want to see him take a last breath...I want to be able to describe it to the rest of the family. Muhammad will be given the chance to say some final words. Mr Lewis, who said he would have preferred a more "gruesome" execution method, wished he could say something too. "It would be short and simple: 'I'm here to see you die...son of a bitch'."

Jonathan Sheldon, Muhammad's lawyer, said: "Virginia will execute a severely mentally ill man who also suffered from Gulf War Syndrome the day before Veterans Day." Telegraph

8It 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.The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace. Commentators, reporters, psychologists and, indeed, army spokesmen continue to warn portentously, "We don't yet know the motive for the shootings."

Now the murderer gets an Attorney


What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. 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?

It was the same case to be presented, in varying forms, by guest psychologists, the media, and a representative or two from the military, for days on end. 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. As the meditations on Maj. Hasan's motives rolled on, "fear of deployment" has served as a major theme—one announced as fact in the headline for the New York Times's front-page story: "Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment." The authority for this intelligence? The perpetrator's cousin. No story could have better suited that newspaper's ongoing preoccupation with the theme of madness in our fighting men, and the deadly horrors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, than this story of a victim of war pressures gone berserk. The one fly in the ointment—Maj. Hasan had of course seen no war, and no combat.

Still, with a bit of stretching, adherents of Maj. Hasan-as-war-victim theme found a substitute of sorts—namely the fears allegedly provoked in him by his exposure, as an army psychologist, to the stories of men who had been deployed. The thesis then: Maj. Hasan's mental stress, provoked by the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could. Let's try putting that one before a jury. By Sunday morning, Gen. George Casey Jr., Army chief of staff, confronted questions put to him by ABC's George Stephanopolous—among them the matter of the complaints about Maj. Hasan's anti-American tirades that were made by fellow students in military classes, as well as other danger signs ignored by officials when they were reported, apparently for fear of offense to a Muslim member of the military.

These were speculations, Gen. Casey repeatedly cautioned. We need to be very careful, he explained, "We are a very diverse army." Mr. Stephanopolous then helpfully summarized matters: This case then was either a case of premeditated terror—or the man just snapped. The general was not about to address such questions. He was there to recite the required pieties, and describe the military priorities . . . which are, it appears, a concern above all for the sensitivities of a diverse army, a concern so great as to render even the mention of salient facts out of order, as "speculation.'" "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.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board. WSJ Online

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. As Melanie Phillips wrote in her book Londonistan:

Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.

To the injury of November 5, we add the insults of American officialdom and their poodle media. 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.Source....

A fleet of black Cadillac Escalades hums outside Chelsea hot spot Avenue -- the A-list watering hole of such celebrities as Justin Timberlake and Lindsay Lohan. As the car doors open, a dozen men emerge and a bouncer whisks them over the club's threshold, past a group of shivering models behind the velvet rope. "Who is it?" one of them wonders out loud. "Is it P. Diddy?"

But the man at the center of the entourage isn't a celebrity. He isn't even a mogul. He's Taek Jho Low, a 20-something Wharton grad from Malaysia who has burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars at the city's hottest nightspots in the last three months -- and shows no signs of stopping.

The nightlife scene is abuzz with tales of this international man of mystery -- who goes by the name Jho Low and whose chubby, bespectacled appearance hardly meets the image of a wealthy gadabout. In September, during Fashion Week, sources said, Low helped rack up a $160,000 bar tab at Avenue, including several $900 bottles of Cristal champagne.

One month later, Lindsay Lohan was belatedly celebrating her 23rd birthday at downtown drinking den 1OAK when 23 bottles of Cristal suddenly appeared. They were reportedly paid for by a "mystery Malaysian," who, sources claim, was Low. At chic 27th Street hangout Pink Elephant, Low routinely spends $50,000 to $60,000, according to the club's owner, David Sarner. One night, at the Pink Elephant outpost in Southampton, Low enjoyed himself so much that he kept the revelry going -- all the way to Malaysia, Sarner said.

"He ended up flying eight of our [waitresses] to Malaysia for a party," he added. Strangely, for a man attracting so much attention, very little is known about Low. According to his official biography, he currently serves as a group adviser of several international corporations and was appointed to the board of UBG Berhad, a financial-services group in Kuala Lumpur, last year. But when The Post interviewed Malaysian experts at such think tank as the Council on Foreign Relations, no one had ever heard of Low.

According to inside sources, Low lives at a $100,000-a-month apartment in the Park Imperial, on West 56th Street, home to James Bond actor Daniel Craig and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs -- and he won't go anywhere, not even on the elevator, without at least one bodyguard. Some of Low's entourage of eight to 12 people also reside in two other apartments at the Park Imperial -- a $30,000-a-month pad and a 2,200-square-foot loft with Central Park views that costs $20,000 a month, according to real-estate investor Michael Hirtenstein, who used to live in the latter. Continued here...