Saturday, November 7, 2009

The killings at Fort Hood

And speaking of Muslims, a lot has been said about US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan's murderous rampage at Fort Hood, Texas last Thursday. Predictably much of the media coverage studiously and lamely avoided discussing the relevance of the killer's devotion to Islam. Mark Steyn thinks it's more than just the media, that the Shooter exposes a hole in the U.S. terror strategy:

... a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the "war on terror."

... [Hasan's] 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 ...

... we're scrupulously nonjudgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy ...

... 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.

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