Crunchy Con

Did you read that Nidal Hasan was known to frequent a strip bar near Fort Hood in these past months? Excerpt:

Hasan's presence at the club paints a starkly different portrait of the alleged killer from that offered by his imam and family members, who have described him as a devout Muslim, and one who had difficulty finding a wife who would wear a head scarf and would pray five times a day.

Starz is a strip club located just down the road from the main gate entrance to the Fort Hood Base. It does not serve alcohol, but customers bring their own beer and liquor and buy ice buckets and mixers at the club.

Hasan sat at a table in the back corner of the club, to the left of the stage on which strippers dance around a pole, employees said.

Jennifer Jenner, who works at Starz using the stage name Paige, said Hasan bought a lap dance from her two nights in a row. She said he paid $50 for a dance lasting three songs in one of the club's private rooms on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30.

"I remembered his face because it was the first lap dance I [gave] to a customer while working here," she said. "When I saw his face [Friday] on TV, I jumped out of bed, I knew it was him."

You may be thinking: how does this square with his being a devout Muslim? Keep in mind that the 9/11 hijackers reportedly did the same thing. A source of mine who does counterterrorism analysis says that we in the West might see this behavior as undermining the case for Hasan's piety, but in fact it doesn't. My source says that within Islamic law, the only believers guaranteed the forgiveness of all their sins and entry into Paradise are shahids -- that is, martyrs. In that sense, an otherwise highly devout Muslim who suddenly starts going to bars or strip clubs could be seen as in the final stages of preparing to martyr himself -- the idea being that he can sin with impunity, because he knows he's about to undertake an act that will cleanse his sin and grant him paradise.

Interesting to consider...

I was at dinner last night with a fellow Orthodox Christian, a believer who came to Orthodoxy from Evangelicalism. He mentioned that it's striking to him how much residual anti-Catholicism still exists within some Orthodox converts from Evangelicalism. I thought about what he said when I read this excellent blog post from Sherry Weddell sent to me by a reader. Sherry's a Catholic convert from Evangelicalism who, in the post, discusses how strange it is that so many Evangelicals have skewed views of Catholics, assuming that they're all "dead" in the faith. Sherry talks about how misguided that is.

But the part she said about how many Catholics view Evangelicals through prejudiced lenses hit a lot closer to home for me. I'm probably guilty of a lot of this too. Excerpt:

From the Catholic side, how many times have I heard intelligent Catholics casually dismiss evangelical worship as merely "entertainment"? It happened again last month when I was working with a group of pastors and pastoral leaders at a seminar on evangelization. I asked them "What have the lapsed Catholics that you know personally told you about why they left"?

The obvious goal of that particular discussion was to hear what people who have left the Church have to tell us. There was a broad spectrum of familiar answers: people didn't agree with certain teachings, didn't believe anymore, looking for community, the desire to be "fed", etc.

Then one woman said "mega church services are entertainment". "They just want entertainment", and a number of heads nodded in agreement.

I had to ask. " Is that the language that your friends actually used? Did they say that wanted to be "entertained"? Did they actually use the word "entertainment"? Since our goal is to understand what motivates lapsed Catholics, we need to actually listen to the language they actually use."

The women looked puzzled by my question. I had to repeat the question to the whole group. "Have you actually heard former Catholics tell you that they have started attending evangelical churches in order to be "entertained"?

Slowly it dawned upon us all. The "entertainment" thesis reflected our Catholic insider judgements about what must have motivated them. But none of us had ever heard an actual, living former Catholic use that language.

Certainly I never have. No former Catholic that I have met in the evangelical world ever talks about a desire for "entertainment" as a motivation for ceasing to attend Mass. In fact, the gap between the dominant "storyline" that you hear from former Catholics whom you meet in the evangelical world (which is usually some variation on "I never met Jesus in a living way as a Catholic") and the judgment that so many Catholic pastoral leaders blithely make about why they left in the first place is staggering.

When we casually dismiss mega-church worship in general as "entertainment", we mean that we regard it as shallow, emotionally-driven, ephemeral, and without spiritual or theological substance or seriousness. The spiritual equivalent of a crude, popular sit-com. That it is, essentially, spiritually "stupid".

Read the whole post. It's easy to write off megachurch Evangelicals as "stupid" because then we in the liturgical churches who have lost members to them don't have to confront the possibility that maybe they had good reason to leave us. I'm not saying a lot of what goes on in megachurch culture isn't stupid (I have had several Evangelical friends say as much to me). I'm saying that if we decide from the outset that the only reason anybody would go to those churches is because of some spiritual or intellectual deficiency, we're closing our eyes to things we might well need to change in how we do things.

It should go without saying that Evangelicals who falsely believe that the old liturgical churches are full of spiritually dead Christians who have nothing to teach us about faith are in the same boat.

Bedlam or Parnassus turns to the Aeneid for a model of a military's blindness to a Trojan horse within.

Over to you, Gen. Casey.

Strong words from Imam al-Awlaki American-born Muslim leader whose former mosque in Virginia the Fort Hood murderer attended:

Nidal Hassan is a hero. He 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 his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn't exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam. Its army is directly invading two Muslim countries and indirectly occupying the rest through its stooges.

Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? In fact the only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.

The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation. Many amongst them are choosing the former. The Muslim organizations in America came out in a pitiful chorus condemning Nidal's operation.

The fact that fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today cannot be disputed.

ABC News, citing two unnamed intelligence sources briefed on the situation, says the CIA became aware months ago that Hasan may have been trying to make contact with al Qaeda.

If this is true, heads should roll -- especially if it is established during the investigation that political correctness -- sorry, Gen. Casey, "diversity" -- kept competent authorities from acting swiftly and sensibly against Hasan.

I wonder how many more Fort Hoods we're going to have before US authorities wake up and realize that we've got a big problem in this country with the Islamic leadership class, which is heavily dominated by the radical Muslim Brotherhood. As I once wrote:

The president apparently missed the smoking-gun 1991 document his own Justice Department introduced into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. The FBI captured it in a raid on a Muslim suspect's home in Virginia.

This "explanatory memorandum," as it's titled, outlines the "strategic goal" for the North American operation of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here's the key paragraph:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

The entire 18-page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It prescribes the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community - this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by sharia.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory out of a bad Hollywood movie - but it's real. Husain Haqqani, head of Boston University's Center for International Relations and a former Islamic radical, confirms that the Brotherhood "has run most significant Muslim organizations in the U.S." as part of the plan outlined in the strategy paper.

It should be said again and again that all Muslims are not sympathetic to this stuff. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a serious situation with the major US Muslim organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the Counterterrorism Blog, the Holy Land Foundation trial exhibits show the following:

1) Many of the existing organizations that have set themselves up as the interlocutors between the Islamic community in the United States and the outside world (including government, law enforcement, and other faiths) were founded and controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood from their inception. Many of them changed their names over time to achieve broader national acceptance.

2) The Brotherhood established a highly-structured organization with many different faces inside the United States while deliberately and continually seeking to hide the Brotherhood's links to its front groups.

3) The agenda to be carried out by these groups in the United States in reality had little to do with the organizations' publicly-proclaimed goals, such as protecting the civil rights of Muslims. Rather, the true goal is to destroy the United States from the inside and work to establish a global Islamist society.

4) The primary function of the Brotherhood structures, from the early 1990s forward, was to support, materially and politically, the Hamas movement in the Palestinian territories, as instructed by the office of the general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

The Virginia mosque where Imam al-Awlaki preached to a congregation that included Hasan, the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, is affiliated with leading Muslim Brotherhood entities in the US. From the center's constitution:

The Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center shall be affiliated with the following organizations:

Muslim American Society (MAS)
North American Islamic Trust (NAIT)
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)

All three of those organizations were named by government lawyers as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising trial, precisely because they are all Muslim Brotherhood entities. As I recount in this blog post, I once had a run-in with the then-president of ISNA, whom I politely asked to explain how he reconciles members of the ISNA board advocating for Islamic extremism and anti-Semitism with his peace, love and understanding rhetoric. He literally, in an editorial board meeting, shook his fist at me for asking the question, compared me to Hitler, and told me I would one day repent for asking that question. Later, I found that the writing of Sayyid Qutb, the late chief ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood and a violent Islamic terrorist revolutionary, was being taught to teenagers at the largest mosque in Dallas, via an annual contest sponsored by MAS.

We do not know for sure to what extent political Islam sets the agenda at mosques and Islamic institutions in America, but it's a fact that most mosques in the US are owned by the Muslim Brotherhood's North American Islamic Trust. Dissident Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser and Sheikh Hisham Qabbani say the dominance of Islamists among the leadership of US mosques and Muslim organizations is heavy (Sheikh Qabbani has testified before Congress that 80 percent of US mosques are under Islamist control). Neither our news media nor our government cares to press these people on what they really believe, and what they're really working for. As Zuhdi Jasser writes:

It is time for the MSM to stop protecting Muslims from one another and to stop stifling the debate many anti-Islamist Muslims would like to wage against leading Islamists. If Muslims are going to form a public expression of Islam which is reconciled with western democracies which separate religion and government, this debate against Islamism needs yet to begin, let alone blossom into cultural change for Muslims. ...

The MSM would prefer to facilitate the current Islamist organizations and Islamist imams. Why? It could be a fear of litigation, minority victim politics, or simple ignorance regarding the goals of Islamism. As in the case with PBS, it could also be the internal influence and infiltration of Islamists within the media and government who will go to great lengths to suffocate the opinions of anti-Islamists, especially anti-Islamist Muslims.

What will it take to get us to put away the soothing narcotic of diversity talk, and ask the tough questions -- and be prepared to act on the answers -- of the Muslim leadership in this country, the questions that ought to have been asked after 9/11. Time to stop pretending.

Mark Steyn connects some dots on Nidal Hasan. For example, did you know this?:

As a student, some who knew Nidal Malik Hasan said they saw clear signs the young Army psychiatrist -- who authorities say went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood that left 13 dead and 29 others wounded -- had no place in the military. After arriving at Fort Hood, he was conflicted about what to tell fellow Muslim soldiers about the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, alarming an Islamic community leader from whom he sought counsel.

"I told him, 'There's something wrong with you,' " Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, said on Saturday.

Danquah assumed the military's chain of command knew about Hasan's doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates in a graduate military medical program. His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan's "anti-American propaganda," but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.

Well, sure. Here's what the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said today:

"Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse," Casey added on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Yes, it would indeed be even worse if the Army stopped being so afraid of being seen as discriminatory that it took seriously Muslim nuts among the ranks who spout anti-American propaganda. If we retreat even a millimeter from Holy Diversity because of this, the terrorists will have won.

You've got to read Steyn's post to see the august company Hasan kept recently, and where he was invited to share his expertise. As Steyn puts it, "That's quite the company for a deranged misfit loner whacko of no broader significance."

UPDATE: Just posted on the New York Times:

A former classmate in the master's degree program said Major Hasan gave a PowerPoint presentation about a year ago in an environmental health seminar titled "Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam." He did not socialize with his classmates, other than to argue in the hallways on why the wars were wrong.

The former classmate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of working for the military and not being authorized to speak publicly, said that some students complained to their professors about Major Hasan, but that no action had been taken. "It didn't cross my mind that he was dangerous," the former classmate said. "He's a chubby, bald guy. He wasn't threatening."

Dr. Aaron Haney, who was a year ahead of Major Hasan in the residency program, said there were many people at Walter Reed who expressed opposition to the wars.

How many of them expressed opposition to the wars in terms used by Islamist organizations, and terrorists? Never mind, nothing to see here, just chant the word "diversity" long enough and all will be well.