Recently in Islamic terrorism Category

When you hear people speaking about how Maj. Hasan must have been motivated by PTSD-by-proxy, or mental illness, or saying that we may never know what motivated him, that it might just remain one of those mysteries of life -- hit 'em with these seven important facts about Hasan, courtesy of Christopher Hitchens. Hitch adds:

All right, then, wasn't the gallant major also subject to ill treatment and even abuse? Only up to a point, when you consider that his parents had been given refuge from Palestine and enabled to build a life here, that he himself had knowingly joined an all-volunteer army, that he had been promoted (it seems rather faster and higher than his true abilities warranted) and allowed on the job to vent extremely noxious opinions about members of other faiths, to say nothing about his adopted country. No doubt he came in for a taunt or two, but if you want to avoid that, then don't express contempt for your fellow soldiers while in uniform. Black Americans used to be segregated. Jewish recruits were mercilessly hazed, as were men or women who looked as if they might be gay. Did any of them ever come up with an act of mass murder as a response? Did any of them ever offer a black or Jewish or gay ideology in justification of it? Would they have earned sympathy and understanding if they had? By the time the mushy "pre-post-traumatic" school was done with the story, Maj. Hasan was not just acquitted of being a bad Muslim. He was more or less exonerated of having even done a bad deed.

This is not at all a matter of the usual stupid refusal of the FBI and other security services to understand an early warning even when they have detected one. It is a direct challenge to the unity and integrity of the armed services, which have been one of our society's principal organs and engines of ethnic and religious integration. A U.S. soldier who wonders about the reliability of his, let alone her, Muslim colleague is not being "Islamophobic." (A phobia is an irrational or uncontrollable fear.) If Maj. Hasan has made this understandable worry in the ranks more widespread, he has done his fanatical preacher friend the greatest possible service. But that's his fault for doing what he did, and his superiors' fault for letting him openly rehearse it for so long, not mine for pointing it out.

Tom Ricks received an e-mail from a retired Army colonel friend, who shared thoughts about how to prevent another Fort Hood shooting. The colonel recalls having had to investigate whether U.S. soldiers and military personnel stationed in Panama prior to the U.S. invasion had been recruited as agents for the Noriega government. He found that 35 had -- and all but one were either Hispanics or married to Panamanians. Excerpt:

When I revealed these somewhat damning results to the J-2 and recommended that ethnic Hispanics, heavily targeted as they were, should receive a special security briefing when they signed in for duty, apprising them that they were particularly vulnerable and targeted when stationed there, the idea did not go over well with Southcom staffers and commanders, and that's putting it mildly. "We cannot insult our fine Hispanic-American soldiers," was the outcry. Sounds like a similar situation now exists with Muslim soldiers.

Fear of "insulting" them causes the Army to circle the wagons, in spite of the obvious appeals being made now by al Qaeda-associated Imam that no soldier in the U.S. Army who is Muslim can faithfully be a Muslim while serving in a force that kills fellow Muslims. This is a serious situation, and someone needs to wake up.

UPDATE: Army Maj. Shawn Keller, who is still on active duty, blames the Army's diversity dementia for the Fort Hood massacre. Excerpt:

This has nothing to do with being anti-Islamic. After numerous tours to Iraq and working with countless cultural advisors on Ft. Bragg, I know dozens of Muslims who I respect and admire greatly. This has everything to do with force protection and security being trumped by the concepts of political correctness and diversity. This has everything to do with a hypocritical system and culture that breeds timidity and dismissiveness in the interest of career advancement. If I preached a white-supremacist ideology or described Timothy McVeigh as a hero to the cause of freedom and liberty, how long do you think I would still be in the military drawing a salary, receiving educational benefits and getting promoted like Hasan did?

Hasan's radical ideology grew to the point that he committed mass murder because too many leaders were too afraid to lead out of fear of harming their career or the image of the Army. If those leaders don't have the intestinal fortitude, moral conviction or personal courage to stand up, speak up and protect soldiers, then retire, resign or get out of the way and let somebody else do it for you.

It's hard to overestimate the power that diversity ideology has on the minds of American elites -- governmental, academic, media and so forth -- irrespective of their identification as Republicans or Democrats.

Meet Khalid Kelly, a former Dublin altar boy now undergoing weapons training in Pakistan, with the dream of killing British soldiers (ye can take the boy out of Ireland...). From the Times of London:

Kelly now sees his time in the West as mental preparation for jihad, claiming he spent a lot of time on the internet learning how to make bombs. He left the UK in 2008 after some friends were arrested for extremist behaviour during a protest about the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed.

After a period underground, Kelly has now re-emerged in Pakistan's Swat valley, where the army recently drove out the Taliban in a three-month military operation. He travels frequently to Rawalpindi, a garrison city next to the nation's capital Islamabad, to meet contacts and spread his radical jihadist message.

In a meeting in one of the city's parks last month he told The Sunday Times that he had a "divine calling" to kill. "I would feel good because you are killing for God. I have practised enough mentally to know that when my time comes I'll be ready. I pray every night for bravery," he said.

Kelly said he moved to Pakistan to join the "best of the best" in the jihadist struggle and to work towards replacing the civilian government with an Islamic one. As Islamabad vows to take on Islamic militants, Kelly harbours a dark hope that Pakistan will become like Iraq with "beheadings and kidnappings".

His face brightens at the mention of suicide bombings and shootings that have devastated hundreds of Pakistani families since the army launched its recent offensive against Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in the tribal belt of Waziristan.

He is also unapologetic about his desire to fund, encourage and take part in terrorism. "I always believe Islam is terrorism. We are told to terrorise the enemies of Islam," he said. "The world will become a dangerous place. Everybody had better start embracing Islam or people will start flying planes into buildings again."

May Khalid Kelly gets his wish to face British troops one day soon. And may the Queen's soldiers' aim be true. If he won't turn from this murderous fanaticism -- he even tells the interviewer that he hopes his young son dies in jihad -- this bloke needs killin'.

From my weekend Dallas Morning News column:

When it comes to investigating and exposing radical Islam in America, the media see their job as managing the story, not telling it. Six years ago, the then-head of the Islamic Society of North America came in for an editorial board meeting. He talked about peace, friendship and tolerance. But when I calmly asked him how he reconciled that rhetoric with the record of support for radical causes among ISNA board members, he shook his fist at me and called me a Nazi.

That routine is, alas, not alien to American Muslim leaders with whom I've clashed since. They obfuscate what they really believe and try to intimidate critics into silence with accusations of bigotry. They cannily understand that's kryptonite to many journalists, who find Baptists scarier than Wahhabists.

In 2007, influential American Muslims convinced PBS to deep-six a documentary highlighting the lonely battle waged by Muslim patriots like Zuhdi Jasser, seeking to awaken Americans to the danger from political Islam. These Muslim outsiders point out that the leadership of most mosques and American Islamic institutions is hopelessly compromised by politicized radicals of the international Muslim Brotherhood. But elites prefer to listen to their Muslim counterparts, who tell the incurious bien-pensants what they want to hear.

When anti-Semitic, anti-Christian hate literature is found at a mosque, or radical speakers give a program praising a Muslim fanatic, or Muslim children are taught the philosophy of the foremost philosopher of Islamist terror - all of which have happened in the Dallas area in recent years - few care to notice.

Do people think the Nidal Hasans come from nowhere?

UPDATE: Don't believe me? Listen to Muslim activist (and Navy veteran) Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. Excerpt:

David Brooks recently wrote that the media's initial downplaying of Hasan's religion was a charitable impulse, but a paternalistic and morally unserious one. Do you agree?

I couldn't agree more, and I would go one step further. We have to acknowledge that there are Muslims who believe in this country and who are going to lead the effort to defeat the ideology that kills people like [the Fort Hood victims]. But we also have to acknowledge that there are other Muslims and versions of Islam that are truly a threat to this country. Every time leaders or media or government discuss Islam, they need to discuss both.

If we look at events like [Fort Hood] and conclude that that's what Islam is, then we're going to alienate the allies we most need: Muslims like myself who want to have a civil war within the faith to marginalize the Islamists. We want to go through the same process the West went through, to push the theocrats to the side. I think there were very religious Christians who did that. We're not going to have that debate if we're not willing to talk openly about religion.

It's funny, but we were a lot more comfortable discussing religion in the public square in 1789 than we are today.

We've got to get more comfortable taking religion seriously. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see in the media, some of these guys from CAIR and other organizations compare this stuff to Christian abortion clinic bombers. It could not be more incorrect, and even dangerous, simply to dismiss these people as lone wolves. The denials must stop. It is time for a frank public accountability and responsibility from American Muslims about the role of political Islam in creating Hasan and future Hasans.

Did you know that one of the U.S. government's Muslim counterterrorism advisers is a fellow who claims that the notorious Sayyid Qutb -- the most influential theorist of Islamic terror and Osama bin Laden's philosophical mentor -- did not want worldwide Islamic revolution, and in fact was a spiritual ecumenist from whom Americans can learn to be better people? I explain it all here.