Fort Hood and the PC Cowards

Not long after the massacre at Fort Hood, when it became clear that once again the lamestream media were going out of their way to avoid the obvious, I went on Bill O’Reilly’s program on Fox and said:  Political correctness is a virus running through the bloodstream of our culture, and it is killing American journalism.

There was plenty of evidence, early on, that Major Nidal Malik Hasan had – let’s be politically correct and say – religious issues.  Or let’s not and be more blunt:  He was an Islamic fanatic, a soldier with a record of expressing anti-American and pro-jihadist sentiments.

That the lamestream media chose to ignore this for as long as they could is no surprise.  They chose the “post-traumatic stress disorder” storyline instead.  It re-inforced their biases against the wars America was waging, and made them feel better about themselves.  Evan Thomas, the editor at large at Newsweek went on TV with another brilliant theory.  “I think he’s probably just a nut case,” Thomas said.  This is what passes for intelligent analysis in the lamestream media these days.  Imagine how many facts Evan Thomas had to ignore to come to that dopey conclusion.  But it wasn’t just liberals in the media who chose to look the other way.  Maj. Hasan’s superiors in the Army chose to ignore the obvious, too.  And so did the CIA.

Brian Ross, of ABC News, has reported that Hasan tried to contact people connected to the terrorist group al Qaeda.  And, according to Ross, U.S. intelligence officers were aware of that fact months ago, but “it’s not known whether the military was ever told by the CIA or others that one of its majors was making efforts to communicate with figures under electronic surveillance.”

If the CIA did not tell the Army, the heads should roll at Langley.  But in any case there was plenty the Army knew, with or without the CIA, and willfully dismissed. The Associated Press has reported that “Fellow students of Hasan in a military training course 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 complaint.”

If someone in a position of authority had not been so politically correct, so downright cowardly, Maj. Hasan would have been drummed out of the military a long time ago.  Rest assured, he will be held accountable for his actions.  But the others should be held accountable, too.  The ones who were lacked the guts to speak up and do the right thing, for fear they might offend Muslims.

It’s no secret that political correctness is killing American journalism.  Apparently it also had a heavy hand in killing those Americans at Fort Hood.