Israel Matzav

Major Nidal Malik Hassan's enabler

Mark Steyn nails the political correctness that led to the Fort Hood massacre earlier this month (Hat Tip: Instapundit):

Major Hasan couldn’t have been more straightforward about who and what he was. An army psychiatrist, he put “SoA”—i.e., “Soldier of Allah”—on his business card. At the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, he was reprimanded for trying to persuade patients to convert to Islam and fellow pupils objected to his constant “anti-American propaganda,” but, as the Associated Press reported, “a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.”

This is your brain on political correctness.

As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in U.S. history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit. And he gave the presentation to a roomful of fellow army psychiatrists and doctors. Some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And, when the question of whether then-Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic,” the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents.”

This is your brain on political correctness.

So instead he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood. And barely had he got to Texas when he started making idle chit-chat praising the jihadist murderer of two soldiers outside a recruitment centre in Little Rock. “This is what Muslims should do, stand up to the aggressors,” Major Hasan told his superior officer, Colonel Terry Lee. “People should strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square.”

In less enlightened times, Colonel Lee would have concluded that, being in favour of the murder of his comrades, Major Hasan was objectively on the side of the enemy. But instead he merely cautioned the major against saying things that might give people the wrong impression. Which is to say, the right impression.

This is your brain on political correctness.

“You need to lock it up, major,” advised the colonel.

Steyn's warnings on political correctness are pertinent for Israel as well. Too many of our politicians ignore what the Arab Muslims would like to do to the Jews in this country since it's not politically correct to talk about it. We pretend that the 'Palestinians' want peace when they don't and we appease their enablers in Washington, New York, London and Paris by stifling normal life in our own communities. We pretend that creating a 'Palestinian state' on the '1967 borders' will resolve our dispute with the Arab world when nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, it's all part of the same political correctness. And if we and other countries in the free world don't stop abiding by it, we're going to end up with more Nidal Malik Hassan's in more countries around the world.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:19 AM