The importance of learning what to look for

Once again, an act of “sudden, unexplained” violence by an American Muslim has generated furrowed brows, chin-pulling, and puzzled looks in the press and, more alarmingly, in the law enforcement community. The killings at Ft. Hood by Major Nidal Malik Hasan have all the earmarks of a jihad long in the gestation, grounded in orthodox Islamic theology and the lunatic fantasies of political Islam. And if his former colleague, retired Army Col. Terry Lee is correct, the signs have been there for many years. They could be seen in Major Hasan’s insistence that Muslims have a right to “rise up” against the U. S. military because the war on terror is a “war against Islam”; in his claim to be a “Palestinian” rather than an American, and a “Muslim first, and an American second”; and in the very particular reason for his reluctance to be deployed overseas. We have it on the authority of the Major’s cousin that Hasan was “mortified” at the thought of being deployed to Afghanistan: not “afraid,” notice, as any rational person would be (although as a psychologist Major Hasan would not have been thrown into combat), but “mortified.” And it should have been obvious why: if the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda is really a war against Islam, then no devout Muslim could possibly take part in it, and every Muslim would have a religious obligation to “rise up against the military”.

Who told Major Hasan that the war on terror is a war against Islam? This is bin-Laden’s claim, of course, but we can be certain the Major was not having cell-phone conversations with the Man in the Cave.

So who was he having conversations with? And is anyone in the FBI or the Army interested in getting an answer to that question?

There are plenty of candidates. Major Hasan could have learned from many American Muslim leaders that the war on terror is just a cover for a war against Muslims. Could he have learned it from one of the Muslim Army chaplains recruited by Abdurahman Alamoudi, founder of the Islamic Society of Boston, currently serving a federal prison term on terrorism charges, and one of the chief fund-raisers in America for al-Qaeda? Could he have learned it from officials at the Congress on American Islamic Relations, or the Islamic Society of North America, or the Muslim American Society, or any one of a number of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front groups posing as Muslim civil rights organizations?

Interesting questions, but it’s unlikely we will find the answers. Despite all of the signs in the Hasan case — including the internet postings that at last alerted the FBI — no one in authority saw that Hasan was on the slippery slope toward jihad, because no one in authority has been trained to look for such signs. In fact, many people in authority have been trained NOT to look, by agency rules that forbid discussion of any phenomenon that requires the use of any word with “Islam” or “Muslim” anywhere in it: words like “Islamism,” or “Islamofascism,” or “radical Islam”, or even “Islamic terrorism”. This policy of “not seeing” is no surprise, given that the very groups who teach law enforcement and military personnel about Islam are the very ones that promote the most orthodox teachings when they think the infidels aren’t listening.

If you haven’t been trained to look for something, it is unlikely that you will see it, even when it’s right in front of you. Case in point: the child welfare authorities in Florida and Ohio who, when the teenage apostate Rifqa Bary said her father had promised to kill her for converting to Christianity, dismissed the very possibility of such a thing, treating this case just like all the other cases of troubled teenagers running away from home, even though apostate killings and honor killings are well-documented phenomena in Muslim communities all over the world.

But there are so many cases in point, it’s getting hard to keep track: Tarek Mehanna, the young Muslim from Sudbury, Massachusetts, who planned a Mumbai-style massacre at shopping malls; or the Muslim soldier who murdered his comrades at an Army base in Kuwait; or the young Muslim men who plotted to shoot up Ft. Dix in New Jersey; or the middle-aged Muslim who suddenly “snapped” and shot up the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles Airport; or the young Muslim who shot Army recruiters, killing one and wounding another. As in these cases (and there are many more), the case of Major Hasan went unnoticed because of the ignorance of the officials who are supposed to be watching out for our safety. It was that ignorance that killed 12 and wounded 30 in Texas, and it will kill many more unless it is quickly overcome. Yet there is little reason to believe that it will be. Even now, somewhere in the United States, a true believer is whispering into the ear of a lost and earnest Muslim, telling him that the world is his enemy, Islam his only salvation, dying for Allah a thing that he might consider, should the opportunity arise.

Yet here is what the press will continue to say, in a desperate effort to avoid the obvious:

1. Major Hasan was upset because of his bad service report. (Yet he received a bad report because he was already upset, and he was upset because the United States was waging a war against Islam.)
2. Major Hasan was alarmed about deployment to Afghanistan because of the “horrors” described to him by returning soldiers. (Yet the “horror” he feared the most was not death or injury; the worst horror was taking part in a war against his faith.)
3. Major Hasan was mentally ill; his actions were no different from any “ordinary” psycho killer who has lost his job, or his wife, or his dignity: a random act, with no rational motive. (On the contrary, the reports from Ft. Hood describe a man who shouted “God is Great” in Arabic, dispatching infidels while anticipating his own glorious martyrdom — a “religious” practice sanctioned and promoted by Islamic authorities all over the world, from Dearborn to Dubai to Indonesia.)

Here is what the authorities need to know, but as of now do not know:

Somebody told Major Hasan that the war on terror is a war against Islam; that he is a Palestinian and not an American; that he must be a Muslim first and an American second; that Muslims must rise up against the military. He might have learned these things in some online Islamist chat room, or he may have heard it from a local preacher. He may have heard some of it from his parents. He did not learn it just by picking up the Koran and falling upon a command to fight the infidels in the name of Allah. Somebody had to point out the orthodox teaching, drill it into an impressionable mind, and send it about its deadly work. Find the teachers, and you will find the next jihadist.

As Robert Spencer put it on Jidhadwatch yesterday: “The effect of ignoring or downplaying the role that Islamic beliefs and assumptions may have played in [Hasan’s] murders only ensures that — one again — nothing will be done to prevent the . . . . next Nidal Hasan.”

Or as George Orwell put it long ago: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

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