For the FBI, religion remains a much too sensitive subject, much more so than the threatening ideologies of yesteryear. Imagine if Maj. Hasan had been an officer during the Cold War, regularly expressing his sympathy for the Soviet Union and American criminality against the working man. Imagine him writing to a KGB front organization espousing socialist solidarity. The major would have been surrounded by counterintelligence officers.A law-enforcement agency par excellence, the FBI reflects American legal ethics. Because the FBI is always thinking about criminal prosecutions and admissible evidence, its intelligence-collecting inevitably gets defined by its judicial procedures. Good counterintelligence curiosity--that must come into play before any crime is committed--is at odds with a G-man's raison d'être. And much more so than local police departments--which are grounded to the unpleasantness of daily life--it is highly susceptible to politically correct behavior.
Powerfully intertwined in all of this is liberal America's reluctance to discuss Islam, Islamic militancy, jihadism, or anything that might be construed as invidious to Muslims. The Obama administration obviously doesn't want to get tagged with an Islamist terrorist strike in the U.S.--the first since 9/11. The Muslim-sensitive 9/11 Commission Report, which unambiguously named the enemy as "Islamist terrorism," now seems distinctly passé.
Thoughtful men should certainly not want to see a U.S. president propel a "clash of civilizations" with devout Muslims. However, clash-avoidance shouldn't lead us into a philosophical cul-de-sac. The stakes are so enormous--jihadists would if they could let loose a weapon of mass destruction in a Western city--that we should not prevaricate out of politeness, or deceive ourselves into believing that a debate between Muslims and non-Muslims can only be counterproductive.
Journalists too disarm themselves, at least when it comes to dealing with groups they deem to be Underdogs (this is where I think liberal bias in newsrooms is most damaging). It's not that journalists are especially sensitive to religion, and that's why they are, and always will be, incurious about the extent of Islamic radicalization in America's Muslim institutions and mosques. It's that they don't really understand religion, and the power of ideas, and feel in their bones their job is to protect Muslims from the great American unwashed masses, especially the Christian ones they're sure are out there ready to string up Muslims at the least opportunity.
We Americans, religious and secular both, have powerful fundamental views about religion that put radical Islam in a certain context, one that prevents us from understanding how unlike other American religious expressions it is -- and how much of a threat it is to the civil order. If you think of radical Islam not as a religion, but as a hostile ideology (e.g., communism), its nature becomes clearer.
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I might also add that official policy is that agencies SHOULD be cooperating, and loads of new measures and procedures have been enacted to make sharing easier, in addition to older measures which made it at least technically possible, if somewhat unusual.
And I'm sure a lot of people are sharing information - those are the stories that don't make the headlines for quite as long. The news will follow a prevented terrorist attack for a few days. They will follow a committed one for months or longer.
But judging by recent events, still not enough folks doing it.
And what would gun rights nitwits say if we passed a law that muslims couldn't carry guns? They would scream bloody murder.
Damn right!
We should be able to bring up people like Hasan on violations of laws against terrorism. But also against sedition, espionage, aiding the enemy.
Would that also apply to spies for Israel, like Larry Franklin, Douglas Feith, Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Lieberman, etc?
The "political corectness" here has nothing to do with our modern world, and instead has a very old American pedigree. Since the time of the Founding Fathers the Federal Govermment has been loathe to meddle in the affairs of any church, but has given religion a very broad pass. The very few times when it did not reinforced the lesson that it should have (see: Waco-- Branch Dravidians).
And it's partisan dumbth to blame this on Obama. We are all agreed, I think, that George Bush's administration was not kind and gentle to terrorists: two wars, 100K+ dead, torture, a trillion dollars spent, civil liberties curtailed... But amid all that American Islam continued on its course (radical or not) with nary a polite "Excuse me" from the FBI or any other federal authority.
This is something deeply ingrained in our political culture. Barak Obama did not invent it. I don't even think Thomas Jefferson did.
It's worth remembering here that we are dealing with two categories of human thought that traditionally have been handled quite differently in American society.
Religion in America has traditionally been based on the individual right of each person to find their own path. This means that all denominations and faiths are obliged to compete for followers using persuasion and argument rather than force or compulsion (either through threat of violence, rule of law or both).
But this also means that, just as religious arguments have no sway in the political realm, the government has generally given members of religious communities wide latitude to practice their faith as they see fit. This is a strong inhibition that protects religion more than just about any other activity.
Certainly no-one would consider writing in exemptions to anti-discrimination legislation based on one's affiliation with a political party, but religious discrimination is afforded that as a matter of course. Likewise, in what other country in the world would the government even consider writing faith healing into a health insurance bill?
So freedom of religion and the wall of separation between Church and State provides tradeoffs and benefits on both sides.
Now let's consider what we are proposing here, by asking that Islam be treated more like a political movement (like communism) than how religions have traditionally been treated here.
I view this as part of the ongoing politicization of religion in this country. The same forces that lead the faithful to demand their religious tokens in government and that demand laws be passed on the basis of religious conviction also leads the religious to treat rival faiths more as political movements that should not be afforded the same level of respect that they have traditionally received.
By no means is this merely an attack on social conservatism, although social cons are the primary exponents of the politicization of religion in America today. Of course militant Islam is doing the same thing (and of course as a mostly external movement, never bought into the grand bargain of religious toleration the way conservative Christians in the US once did).
The problem is that the neo-conservatives, who have been in the forefront of opposing militant Islam, have self-consciously allied themselves with the forces of social conservatism, which in turn interprets the conflict not just a matter of shutting down al Qaeda or finding individuals intent on causing us harm, but rather an apocalyptic battle between good (the Christian USA) vs. evil (the Islamic Middle East).
Because the "war" is imbued with all of this religious apocalypticism on both sides, the stakes are raised considerably higher than they would otherwise be. Consider the difference in reaction to the Oklahoma City bombings and 9/11: the reaction to 9/11—two wars, thousands of soldiers dead and wounded, perhaps millions of civilian casualties, massive spending and debt, assaults on civil liberties, torture, etc., etc., etc.—was all out of proportion to either the real threat or the actual damage done.
Likewise, our reaction to two high school students shooting up a high school in Columbine is essentially to treat the problem as a crime, with perhaps more resources to identify troubled individuals. Meanwhile, the exact same action when the perpetrator is Muslim on a military base is to treat the problem as a larger struggle between the US and Islam.
This politicization of religion has far-reaching consequences for all of us, faithful and unfaithful alike. It's a high stakes game: religious people risk alienating broad swathes of the populace (which as I have pointed out interferes with the primary business of saving souls) in an effort to assert control over the government. Personally, I think the end of such a policy will either be a theocracy or a European-style society where religion is utterly marginalized.
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