Death by Diversity
Topic: Decline of the West
There was a time when Americans—from presidents to ordinary private citizens—had no problem recognizing the face of evil. The abolition movement didn’t treat slavery as a mental disorder requiring therapy. The people of this country didn’t view National Socialism as multicultural quirk of German history. It was the aroused conscience of the nation that finally put an end to legally sanctioned racial segregation. But somewhere along the way, that kind of moral clarity, the ability to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, seems to have faded out of our public culture.
You see evidence of this in small things and big ones. A college student wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. Casual toleration of marital infidelity. Easy acceptance of a politician’s lies. And just recently, a frightening inability to perceive that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan is an Islamist radical who carried out a calculated act of terror.
The bodies had hardly been bagged before media pundits and self-nominated experts like Dr. Phil betrayed their blindness to reality. Whatever could have driven this Army officer to do such a terrible thing? Doubtless he was under a good deal of post-traumatic stress. Perhaps he felt picked upon due to his religion—which, the pundits hastened to add, could not possibly have had a single thing to do with his murderous rampage. Islamofascism? Terrorism? Perish the thought!
As those of us who are willing to look at the facts well know, Nidal Malik Hasan is indeed a radical Islamist. He made no particular secret of it, either. Yet despite his string of incendiary statements and his terrorist connections, neither the Army nor the FBI felt that his views and activities merited concern. Indeed, the Army even promoted the man. A string of adverse, career-killer officer evaluation reports proved no barrier to Hasan’s steady progress through the commissioned ranks. People just preferred not to recognize him for what he was.
How could this be so? Though disheartening, it was also enlightening to watch the Chief of Staff of the United States Army regurgitate the standard talking points of our therapeutic culture. Terrible as the Fort Hood massacre had been, he opined, it would be worse if the Army’s “diversity” suffered. I thought at that moment that the three dozen wounded, the thirteen dead and all their families and loved ones would gladly trade some Army diversity for a world in which Hasan had been booted from the ranks before he ever had a chance to launch his one-Muslim jihad. But that could never have happened, for Hasan represented to the leadership of the Army just that diversity so dear to General Casey’s heart. He was a Muslim officer—a mental-health professional, no less!—and they were determined to hang onto him at all costs. You can call this a commitment to diversity if you like. I call it an example of intellectual dishonesty combined with moral idiocy that culminated in an orgy of death and terror.
Barack Obama went to Fort Hood yesterday to address the troops, and many of his words were well chosen. But for all his eloquence, the President seemed to suffer from a speech impediment. He could not pronounce the relevant words: terrorist, Islamist radical, Muslim fanatic. Instead he said: “It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know—no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor.”
I agree with the last part of that. No just and loving God spoke to Nidal Malik Hasan. But the rest is nonsense on stilts. For those with eyes to see, ears to hear and the memory of history, Hasan’s actions are all too comprehensible. We’ve seen his kind before. They shot and gassed countless Jews in German-occupied Poland, Ukraine and Russia. They operated Stalin’s executions cellars and guarded his Gulag. For the most part they were ordinary men who in their private lives would never have dreamed of committing rape, torture or murder. But their faith—in the will of the Führer, in the promise of socialism’s radiant future—was a real and living force for evil.
More recently men such as these have been busily at work in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq, New York City, Madrid, London—Fort Hood, Texas. The President would have done well yesterday to describe for the world the true nature of the murderous ideology that possessed the soul of Nidal Malik Hasan. Instead, he employed weasel words—presumably not to offend the world’s Muslims. But if Nidal Malik Hasan’s actions do not greatly offend mainstream Islam—and it appears that they don’t, not really—then the President’s sensitivity is badly misplaced. His circumlocutions are futile. His platitudes are received by our enemies as the whine of a coward, and they rejoice at his timid refusal to pronounce their name.
Dostoevsky, I think, once remarked that every great evil begins with a lie. First we lie to others then we lie to ourselves, and finally we become blind to the approach of evil. That’s an apt summation of the malady that fogs the minds of so many Americans. That’s why they didn’t see Nidal Malik Hasan coming. That’s why they still can’t recognize him for what he is.
Posted by tmg110
at 6:41 AM CST
Updated: Thursday, 12 November 2009 7:22 PM CST
