THE UNITED STATES AND ISLAMIC TERRORISTS

• First is the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who took two handguns and killed 13 people and wounded 31 at Fort Hood, Texas.  Was Major Hasan a victim?  Early news reports and commentaries presented this case as one in which Major Hasan was a victim of anti-Muslim harassing and that his behavior must be understood as a result of stress and the fear of imminent deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.  Hasan-as-war-victim was a theme heard frequently in the days subsequent to the tragedy.  His exposure to the stories of men who had been deployed provoked him to do what he did.  Was he a victim of pre-traumatic stress syndrome and a secondary stress disorder that comes from hearing about other people’s stress?  Was he traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone?  Are these the factors that explain his horrific butchery?  The possibility of Islamic extremism and terrorism as an explanation was played down immediately in the press.  This was an isolated personal incident, a breakdown that had nothing to do with Radical Islamic ideology.  Columnist David Brooks writes:  “A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation.  Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.  There was a national rush to therapy.”  The end result of this “national therapy” was that it absolved Hasan before any definitive evidence was gathered and/or clarified.  So, what do we know for certain about Hasan?

1. We know that Hasan killed his fellow Americans, who were unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances as he screamed Allahu Akbar (“God is great”). 
2. We know that Hasan chose an extreme Islamic terrorist ideology.  He was in touch with and read some writings of a most vitriolic, anti-American imam, the radical cleric now in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki.
3. We know that his business card included the cryptic abbreviation “SoA,” apparently Soldier of Allah.
4. We know from emails Hasan sent in December 2008 that he was deeply engaged with applying religious values to violence.  He suggested that a suicide bomber might have just as noble a purpose as a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect his comrades.
5. In June 2007 he made a PowerPoint presentation at Walter Reed arguing that the Koran forbids Muslims from killing other Muslims.  Iraq and Afghanistan were impossible wars therefore for Muslims.  Similarly, he made another PowerPoint presentation entitled “Why the War on Terror is a War on Islam.” 
6. He was a regular attendee at the Killeen mosque near the base where he frequently expounded on his view that Muslim soldiers should not be required to fight in Muslim lands.

Based on these facts, it is quite difficult to view Hasan as a victim.  He is a perfect example of a self-radicalized Muslim.  There is very little evidence of stress syndrome or victimization.  This whole narrative of Hasan as victim has ignored a central premise of the war on terror—the struggle against Islam is [or should be recognized as] the central feature of American foreign policy.  This whole narrative also ignored what Brooks calls the “possibility of evil” long before the evidence was in; “it sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment.”  A mature, ethically serious nation should not do that!  Put another way, we do so to our peril.  Major Nidal Malik Hasan was not a victim.  He is a perfect example of a self-radicalized Muslim who killed 13 of his fellow Americans!  It is ethically wrong and shallow to ignore the fact that radicalized Islam is possible and can be a dire threat to the national security of the US.

• Second is the strange and quite frankly unbelievable decision of Attorney General Eric Holder to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, in a civilian court in lower Manhattan.  Why?  Such a trial will permit Mohammad to use this trial as a venue for his anti-American, radicalized Islamic diatribes.  It will be an opportunity for the world to see this terrorist and it will do the US little good when the trial is replayed all over the Muslim world.  Holder says it promotes “rule of law.”  But the US already has a judicial process in place for such terrorists.  The 2006 Military Commissions Act, adopted by a bipartisan Congress, obliges the executive and legislative branches to approve a detailed plan to prosecute the illegal “enemy combatants” captured since 9/11.  Furthermore, as the Wall Street Journal observes editorially, “Contrary to liberal myth, military tribunals aren’t a break with 200-plus years of American jurisprudence.  Eight Nazis who snuck into the US in June 1942 were tried by a similar court and were hanged within two months.”  Incredibly, Eric Holder acknowledged the value of military tribunals because the Guantanamo detainee who allegedly planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen will be tried in a military tribunal.  Why the difference?  Holder suggested that “the Cole bombers struck a military target overseas and is thus a good fit for a military trial, while KSM and comrades hit the US and murdered civilians and thus deserve a US civilian trial.”  Editorially, the Wall Street Journal correctly concludes that “Foreign terrorists who wage war on America and everything it stands for have no place sitting in a court of law born of the values they so detest.  Mr. Holder has honored mass murder by treating it like any other crime.”

See Wall Street Journal editorial (14-15 November 2009); Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal (10 November 2009); David Brooks in the New York Times (10 November 2009); Scott Shane and James Dao in the New York Times (15 November 2009).

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