Let's start by stating the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the re cent report by Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins concerning the Fort Hood massacre: Unless we expunge it from our national discourse, political correctness gets Americans killed.
On Nov. 5, 2009, Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American citizen, a radicalized Muslim, a psychiatrist and, in the words of the report, "a ticking time bomb," shot up a soldier readiness center on America's largest active-duty Army base, killing 12 military personnel and one civilian, and wounding 32 others. It was a direct assault on the armed forces of the United States by a self-proclaimed "Soldier of Allah" (written on his business cards) who shouted the Muslim incantation Allahu akbar before opening fire.
It's hard to imagine a clearer example of the asymmetrical warfare a free and welcoming country fights against cowardly opponents who refuse to abide by the laws of war, but there it was.
In any other war, someone like Maj. Hasan would never have gotten close to the Army, never have been handled with kid gloves, and never been promoted.
What was the Army thinking? That if we could just get our enemies to like us, all this unpleasantness will soon be over?
America bent over backward after 9/11 to assure Muslims that we weren't at war with Islam. Our country offered the hand of friendship to people like Maj. Hasan -- ignoring his radicalism, his praise of suicide bombers, his sympathy for Osama bin Laden and his belief that his religion, as the report notes, "took precedence over the US Constitution he swore to support and defend as a US military officer . . . Hasan's statements about the primacy of religious law occurred as he was supporting a violent extremist interpretation of Islam and suggesting that this radical ideology justified opposition to US policy and could lead to fratricide in the ranks."
He certainly was right about that.
Did anybody, from the fruit-salad brass to our crack intelligence services, do anything about it? Of course not.
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