ShareThisImagine if, in 1942, the son of German immigrants from the Sudetenland had yelled "Heil Hitler!" and then gunned down several dozen of his fellow soldiers on an American military base. Most reporters probably would not have expressed bewilderment as to the perpetrator's motive. They'd have simply connected the dots and told the public what happened: An army officer appears to have turned traitor, subscribing to the Nazi ideology and choosing to kill for the Nazi cause.
But that was then, this is now. After the attack at Fort Hood, evidently carried out by the Muslim son of Palestinian immigrants, much of the major media disconnected from reality. On CNN and NPR, the pressing question was whether there are enough "mental health professionals" in the army. In other words, perhaps the problem was that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a psychiatrist, didn't have access to ... a psychiatrist.
On MNBC, an anchor wondered whether we will ever know for sure whether religion was a "factor" in a massacre initiated with a shout of "Allahu Akbar!" ("Allah is greatest!") -- the international war cry of terrorists who claim to be fighting what they call a "jihad" for Islam. Even the Fox News Channel displayed such chyrons as: "Investigators search for a motive in Ft. Hood killings."
I know: The intelligence community, the FBI, the military brass -- all stumbled badly in connection with this case. But journalists are not supposed to be like government employees. Reporters are supposed to be risk-takers, seeking the truth and telling it - even when the truth is inconvenient and uncomfortable.
That's what I was taught when I was trained as a journalist, and it's what I believed during the more than 20 years I spent in the business, including at The New York Times which last week ran this front-page, above-the-fold headline: "Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment." Are Times readers really to believe that the alleged perpetrator was such a sensitive soul that, to take his mind off the "horror" of war, he shot as many of his unarmed colleagues as he could, reloading while the dying and wounded lay bleeding on the ground?
The second paragraph of this same story reports that Hasan "started having second thoughts about his military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim, he told relatives." How could professional editors not insist that such a slander of American soldiers -- and one so improbable given the deference paid in the U.S. military both to officers and doctors -- at least be followed by the standard disclaimer that the charge could not be verified?
Islamic extremism is a difficult issue -- but it's not that difficult. We grasp that an ideology based on the premise that one race must dominate all others is odious and dangerous. Is it such a leap to understand that the same is true of an ideology based on the premise that one religion must dominate all others?
That does not imply that all Germans were Nazis during the 1930s and '40s. On the contrary, some Germans fought Nazism. Similarly, many Muslims reject militant Islamism and a brave minority are fighting it. They deserve our support.
But it does not help them when we deny the truth: Hateful, medievalist, supremacist and genocidal ideologies, movements and regimes have risen up from within the world's Muslim communities. They are waging a War against the West -- and against Muslims who don't go along with them. Until and unless we acknowledge this we cannot make sound decisions about how best to defend ourselves, our children and our civilization. And make no mistake: right now we are not.
Michael Ledeen's excellent new book, "Accomplice to Evil," explores the Western reluctance to recognize and confront threats both in the past and in the present. He begins with Baudelaire's famous line: "The loveliest rick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist." These days, however, the Devil can relax. Major-League journalists are playing the trick for him.
Link to NY Times piece: http://en.kiosko.net/us/2009-11-06/np/newyork_times.html
Link to Ledeen's book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Accomplice-Evil-Iran-Against-West/dp/0312570694
(Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism. E-mail him at cliff(at)defenddemocracy.org)
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Or perhaps Nasan did not
Or perhaps Nasan did not shout "Allahu Akbar."
According to a recent CNN story, with the only named "witness" to this shout-out: "'I was sitting in about the second row back when the assailant stood up and yelled "Allahu akbar"’ in Arabic and he opened fire,' Foster said Monday on CNN’s 'American Morning.' Foster, 21, said he wasn’t clear about whether the gunman said those exact words."
And the San Antonio Express-News recently reported: "A spokesman for the post, asked to clarify comments made last week by Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the Fort Hood commander, who suggested that Hasan issued the jihadist battle cry, called it 'speculation.' 'The supposed shouted quote is still a matter of speculation and under investigation by CID,' Bruce E. Zielsdorf said."
Perhaps we should worry about nailing down the facts, before we wander into interpretation