Is the US Army politically correct re: jihadists?

Mark Steyn:

Thirteen dead and 31 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a "tragedy" (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the "War on Terror." Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America's enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy -- a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.

And he's a U.S. Army major.

And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity -- as if believing that "the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor" (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the "noble" "heroism" of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.

More:

To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don't conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don't hold your breath. We'd rather talk about anything else -- even in the Army.

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that's the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy -- in Afghanistan and in Texas.

Kamran Pasha, on a conversation he had with a Muslim convert soldier friend at Fort Hood, a fellow he pseudonymously calls "Richard":

Richard remembered one of his first conversations with Hasan. The newly-arrived army psychiatrist told Richard that he felt the "war on terror" was really a war against Islam, and that perhaps Muslims should not be part of the US military.

Richard told Nidal that he disagreed. First, he did not believe as a Muslim that the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of a grand conspiracy to destroy Islam. And second, even if a Muslim believed that a specific military action was wrong, he could not escape responsibility for it just by resigning from the military. The reality was that his or her taxes would still be used to fund the campaign, and so American Muslims were invested in the situation whether they liked it or not.

Richard's view as a Muslim was that he had a responsibility to do good in whatever situation he found himself in. He was a Muslim in the American military at a time when the United States was in conflict with areas of the Muslim world. Richard's role was to do his part as a Muslim by creating new friendships and partnerships between the American military and the Muslim community.

But Hasan clearly did not share Richard's point of view, and Richard decided not to get into an argument with a fellow solider he had just met. And so the two moved on from their dispute and established a friendship as fellow Muslims in the Fort Hood community.

As Richard got to know Hasan better over the next several months, he found the major to be a pious man who was at the mosque daily. But Richard also began to garner a sense of Hasan's political views that troubled him. A black-and-white outlook on Islam and life that had no room for nuance or debate. Hasan had apparently attended a mosque led by an imam named Anwar Al-Awlaki, a Yemeni scholar whose political views Richard disagrees with.

Awlaki is a controversial figure among Muslims, and has been accused by the Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11 of serving as a "spiritual advisor" to two of the September 11 hijackers. While Richard is careful to say that he respects much of Awlaki's historical scholarship, he rejects his political ideology, which posits a black-and-white, us versus them, view of America's relationship with the Islamic world.

Pasha, a liberal Muslim writing at HuffPo, says that Richard "sadly" agrees that religion was the prime motivator for Hasan's mass murder spree. If Richard didn't go to his superiors and warn them about Hasan as soon as Hasan started saying these things, why not? If he did, why did they not act against Hasan? These are some of the questions the investigation has to answer.

Like Mark Steyn, I find it incomprehensible that members of the Army knew about Hasan's views, but did nothing about him. The Awlaki connection is important; Awlaki is an American-born jihad-pusher who is popular among Muslims living in the West, and who taught at a Virginia mosque connected to the Muslim Brotherhood (presumably that's where Hasan made his love connection with the imam). Could it be that like much of the US government, the military is willfully ignorant (because by this point, it has to be willful) of the real nature of jihadism and its influence within American Islam? Maj. Stephen Coughlin, a military intelligence analyst, was sacked by the Pentagon over his thesis , which argued that the threat from Islamic radicalism persists in part because we don't take Islamic doctrine seriously enough. A Muslim aide to the undersecretary of defense undertook what would become a successful campaign to get Maj. Coughlin fired because he considered Coughlin to be an Islamophobe. After Fort Hood, will the Pentagon take Coughlin seriously now?

I've written before about how stupid the government is to legitimize the Muslim Brotherhood and its American expressions by buying their propaganda, e.g., the Justice Department recruiting at an ISNA conference while at the same time having declared ISNA a co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising trial. We still don't take these people's ideas seriously. Because of that, Stephen Coughlin argued, we're deceiving ourselves about the true nature and the extent of the domestic Islamic extremism threat. To see what is right in front of your nose is surprisingly difficult.