How the enemy can hide in plain sight

U.S. Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is blaming his own department for its attitudes and the military command structure for lapses that allowed Major Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, to progress through the system. As many as eight officers may be held to account.

The day after the shooting, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, the top military man in the U.S. military structure, went on a media blitz to assure serving Muslims that the military would keep a sharp eye out to make sure there no repercussions against them because of Major Hasan’s attack and that “diversity is our strength, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Well, which is it Mr. Secretary?

Do you want your officers to implement Political Correctness -- which is the reason why no action had been taken against Hasan -- or do you want them to keep a better weather-eye on Muslim radicals and root them out?

If PC rules the day, these officers should be given medals for respecting diversity, not prosecuted.

In the 86 pages of the Pentagon review of the shooting, not once does it focus on Major Hasan’s motivation as an Islamist, although apparently there is a separate classified report that deals specifically with Hasan.

According to Gates, the problem with the Defense Department is that:

We have not done enough to adapt to the evolving security threat that has emerged over the past decade. The department is burdened by 20th Century attitudes rooted in the Cold War.

He says that as if it were a bad thing.

Let us consider those 20th century attitudes during the Cold War. They could be summarized as follows:

Communism is evil. It is our enemy and we must be diligent in defeating it. We must not allow our military establishment to be infiltrated and undermined by communists.

It seems to me if you simply substitute Islamism for Communism you pretty much have the attitude you need to get rid of the future Major Hasan’s before they become a problem. But you do have to identify the new “ism” first.

Somebody ought to remind Secretary Gates that we won the Cold War with those attitudes. Maybe if the DOD could bring itself to terms with the idea that it is Islamism that is the enemy it would get better handle on how to defeat it.

Dr. Phil, the Islamists' answer to Lenin's "useful idiot"

If you want to know why we are losing the struggle with radical Islam you don’t have to go very much further than this little piece of national television fare.

It is a segment from CNN’s Larry King Live Show featuring an interview a few days after the Fort Hood event with Dr.Phil, a woman in the Veteran’s Affairs Administration, and a JAG lawyer.

Philip McGraw gets the head start, which means he gets to frame the discussion that follows. For him, this is a mental/emotional issue, full stop.

You can’t blame him for that, it is his field, it is the prism through which he views the world, and it is the thing he is most comfortable talking about.

I would venture to say he knows diddly-squat about Islam, from at least one comment he made.

Next up are two other split screen guests, Shoshana Johnson, who served in Iraq and was, for a brief period, a POW, and Tom Kenif (not sure of the spelling) a JAG officer and criminal lawyer who also served in Iraq.

Kenif disputes the mental explanation, believing the truth may lie in Islamic extremism. However, both McGraw and Johnson jump down his throat, accusing him of saying dangerous things that are simply untrue and ridiculous. It is also pretty clear from King’s interjections that he finds Kenif’s explanation suspect.

At various times, Dr. Phil says things like, “You can’t make sense out of nonsense” and “Well (mentally healthy) people don’t pick up a gun and kill their friends.”

Unfortunately for Kenif, in the ensuing argument he falls into Dr. Phil’s trap, agreeing that a person who murders people for religious reasons is mentally ill. At that point he loses the argument.

Wrong, Dr. Phil. That is music to the Islamists’ ears.

Go on spouting about mental illness and believing that the military should focus on stress and not religion. This was a one-off, an isolated incident, completely explained away by westernized notions of mental illness. It has nothing to do with Islam. Move along now, nothing to see here.

The Islamic Project will give you a big medal for that one.

There is no reason to think whatsoever that an Islamic radical who kills the perceived enemies of Allah, with the full knowledge that if he dies in that battle he will be guaranteed eternal life in Paradise -- the only guaranteed path in the Koran -- is mentally ill. There is nothing nonsensical about this if the religion makes sense.

The only way that could be true is if you were to say that all people who believe religious doctrine must be mentally ill. No American is going to say that, certainly not Dr. Phil.

You could possibly refine that last statement and say that only people who believe the religious dogma of Islam are mentally ill because of the violence it spawns. Again, no American in the mainstream media and establishment is going to say that.

If Major Hasan was acting out of purely religious motivation then the soldiers he killed or tried to kill were not his friends, Dr. Phil. They were his enemies. There is nothing irrational about that. Soldiers are supposed to kill their enemies.

And if you knew anything at all about Islam, Mr. McGraw, you would know that Muslims are not permitted to make friends with non-believers.

Mr. Kenif had the right idea even if he couldn’t follow it up properly on the King show.

The safest way to proceed after Fort Hood is to assume an Islamic influence and act accordingly, and revise your judgment only if subsequent evidence emerges that mental factors unrelated to religion are prevalent. This would be called an application of the precautionary principle, or, as we used to say, doing something simply out of an abundance of caution.

Unfortunately, the Dr. Phils in America control the high ground and more Fort Hood disasters can be expected in the future.

On a related note, here is a Washington Post story of the first post-Fort Hood interview with Hasan’s jihadist mentor.

Canada's ambivalence to 5th columnist Islamism

A couple of days ago, I opened up the on-line version of a mainstream Toronto newspaper and the imagery couldn't have been more jarring.

The top picture showed a Muslim woman all decked out in black with the nijab (head and face covering), exposing only her eyes. She was celebrating, with her 6 children, the release from prison after a 5 year stay, under strict conditions, of her 44 year old husband, Egyptian Mahmoud Jaballah, courtesy of Canada's federal court.

Jaballah is an immigrant who, along with a handful of others who have also been released under conditions, was being held under a "security warrant." This is a draconian legal device to hold somebody deemed dangerous to national security without having to formerly charge them and bring them to trial. Canada's answer to Guantanamo.

The court has already ruled that he cannot stay in Canada, but it is unclear where they will send him, since it is likely if he were deported to Egypt he would be tortured and/or killed (he fled Egypt to Canada in the first place). We don't know the details of the evidence against him because it is still considered a state secret, but I am betting that he wasn't picked up by our authorities for selling Bibles door to door, or that he was chased out of Egypt for the same thing ( a death sentence there). The only thing we do know is that he was associated with Ahmed Saad Khadr, the now deceased -- died in a gun battle with Pakistani troops -- patriarch of the odious and poisonous Khadr clan in Toronto (dubbed by Dr. Daniel Pipes as Canada's first family of terror).

That wasn't so much disturbing to me (disturbing as it was) as the juxtapostion with the picture immediately under that story. It was a picture of the boy next door, the fresh-faced, apple pie eating, 25 year old Nova Scotian, Cpl. Kevin Megeney. He reportedly was killed in his tent in Afghanistan by a single bullet, apparently fired by accident by some fellow soldier. The matter is being investigated and the military is silent on the details.

But this single front page says so much about Canada's ambivalence about Islamism. We are sending our soldiers into battle with Islamists to protect another bunch of Muslims who run their country under the law of the Sharia (but a less strict version -- still allowing the death penalty for converting to Christianity, mind you).

I wonder if Cpl. Megeney was a Christian.

At the same time we have, by polling estimates, about 10% of our domestic Muslim population (that 10% translates into approximately 50,000 in aggregate numbers) who support the supplanting of our liberal democracy with an Islamic state, perhaps run by theocracy like Iran. That poll number, by the way, corresponds to international estimates of Islamists amongst the greater Muslim population, which translates into a staggering 120,000,000 such people.

In World War Two, our fathers and mothers did not have any qualms about quashing 5th columnists. The Japanese were rounded up, along with some Germans and Italians. Of course, it was the worst kind of racial profiling and some very unpleasant things were done to the Japanese in particular. It was possible to do this in Canada because it was about 74% English and 22% French -- there was no ethnic mosaic, no political correctness (they used to openly talk about the yellow peril in Parliamentary debates), no consideration of moral relevancy, no multiculturalism imperatives, and no charter of rights.

We can't do that kind of thing anymore, even if circumstances might suggest it. Nor would I advocate such a thing. But, it is clear to me that Canada is at war with Islamism -- or what the hell is our army doing in Afghanistan -- and that being said, these Islamists in this country are 5th columnists. We need to stop coddling them and start considering what action we can take if they are undermining our war efforts by sapping our political morale.

Or, we need to cease being at war with Islamism in Afghanistan.

Either way, we need to stop sacrificing the Cpl. Megeney's for nothing.