Nidal Malik Hasan

TERRORISM OR DISSENT?: Home grown Islamic terrorism has so far been mostly stymied, but as Fort Hood proves it is clearly on the rise. The way it has been handled, and the Guantanamo issue have many wondering just which side Obama is really on.

ByDennis Mullin

The murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas by an American jihadist of Palestinian descent has many worried that the military is asleep at the wheel. The psychiatrist shooter had jihadist references on his military business card and made no secret of his sympathies with Islamic terrorists.

DENIAL: Many mainstream commentators immediately went out of their way to deny that any radical sympathies were at play, and instead maintained that this was the act of a single deranged individual. While they ignored the obvious, most Americans understand who the shooter was and what he was trying to do. If the investigations that are upcoming in Congress, the intelligence agencies, and the Defense Department reveal that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan got a pass due to political correctness (tolerance for Islam of every shade), or that the various government agencies failed to communicate with each other (a repeat of pre-9/11 mistakes), it will not go down very well.

CHARM OFFENSIVE: The president has conducted a very public charm campaign internationally, blaming America for countless ills and bowing down to foreign leaders. He has made a special effort to reach out to Muslims and Islamic nations. Did his administration get the message and as a result leave our soldiers at risk?

The shooter, Maj. Hasan, was acting suspiciously and showing signs of being a threat. One of his former classmates, Lt. Col. Val Finnell, said there were definitely clear indications that Hasan's loyalties were not with America. That doesn't seem like the type of person who should be walking around in a U.S. Army uniform. He said Hasan even once gave a presentation justifying homicide bombings. Finnell said Hasan was not questioned about his words or actions because the military has a "political correctness climate" and no one would confront Hasan out of fear of an equal opportunity lawsuit.

WORST SINCE 9/11: The Fort Hood massacre was the worst terror attack in the United States since 9/11, but Maj. Hasan was far from the first to suffer from "sudden jihad syndrome." Historian Victor Davis Hanson has noted that "on average, in the 98 months since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, a radical Islamic-inspired terrorist plot has been uncovered every four months." Some of the attacks have been by lone wolves, as when Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar ran over and injured nine students at the University of North Carolina in March of 2006, or when Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad shot two soldiers in front of an Army recruiting station in Little Rock last May, killing one and wounding the other.

Others have been conspiracies. Daniel Patrick Boyd and Hysen Sherifi were among seven suspects arrested in August for planning an attack on the Marine base in Quantico, VA.

Some of the actual and would-be jihadists were immigrants, such as Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a Jordanian living in the U.S. illegally who was arrested in September after planting what he thought were explosives near an office building in Dallas.

Others, such as Maj. Hasan, were U.S. citizens. Others, such as Mr. Boyd and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (formerly Carlos Bledsoe), were native-born Muslim converts. Some were educated, some not; some were wealthy and some poor. What they had in common was a radical Islamist ideology and a deep-seated hatred of America.

RADICAL WAR: Radical Islam has been at war with the U.S. since before 9/11. It is the ideology which is the enemy, whether it is held by a Taliban guerrilla in Afghanistan or by an Army doctor in Bethesda. But President George W. Bush could not or would not articulate this, and President Barack Obama appears not to even recognize it.

It is comforting to believe only a handful of Muslims in the United States are infected by racial Islamism, and there is reason to believe this is so. About 5,000 Muslims serve in the U.S. military. Some, like Capt. Humayan Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004 trying to prevent a suicide bomber from attacking an American compound, have proved their patriotism beyond any shadow of doubt.

NEGLIGENCE: But our leaders undercut the genuinely moderate Muslims and endanger the rest of us when they make excuses for extreme Islamists. It remains to be seen if Maj. Hasan was just a radical Islamist, or a lone wacko who also happened to be a radical Islamist. But it is clear that only gross negligence by his superiors permitted him to be in the position to do so much harm.

"The Army as an institution has been neutered by decades of political correctness and the leaders in Hasan's chain of command failed to act accordingly out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim and receiving a negative evaluation report," wrote Army Maj. Shawn Keller on realclearpolitics.com. It's a sad commentary on the Army today that Maj. Keller is more likely to suffer for publicly criticizing the negligent, than those whose negligence resulted in the deaths of 12 soldiers and a civilian contractor.

MORE DIFFICULT: Now that the administration has decided to bring the terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into the United States and try them in civilian courts as if they were full-fledged American citizens, the situation will become much more difficult. Under American legal procedures evidence cannot be introduced if it is not obtained through very strict controls. Open confessions may not be admissible. Sources and methods will have to be revealed. The terrorists will enjoy an open forum to discuss and publicize their revolutionary messages. This will in effect prove their methods a great success – the killing of Americans and an opportunity to discuss their grievances on a national media platform. Given the polling numbers on terrorism, this may prove to be the Obama administration’s most fatal political miscalculation of them all.