Nidal Malik Hasan

Keeping Extremisms Out of the U.S. Military

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Revelations that the FBI, the Pentagon and even his medical colleagues were aware of Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Malik Hasan's extremist ideology have raised serious questions about the U.S. military's ability to screen, monitor and remove dangerous personnel from its ranks. But far from justifying the discrimination against patriotic American Muslims predictably called for by the usual suspects, the Fort Hood bloodbath should remind Americans that extremisms of all stripes have no place in the armed forces of the United States.

A nation which has chosen to depend on an all-volunteer military must have clear standards for admitting and retaining those courageous few who wish to serve in its name. Needless to say, they should not pose a threat to themselves or their fellow servicemen and women. They should uphold their oath to the Constitution of the United States and its government. And importantly, they should not undermine either American national security objectives or our timeless democratic values by advancing their own.

To be sure, as the always execrable Michelle Malkin fumed in the wake of the Fort Hood slaughter, potential Al Qaeda sympathizers and possibly deranged Muslim extremists like Major Hasan and Sgt. Hasan Akbar must be prevented from entering or quickly weeded out of the American military.

But the danger to America's security at home and goals abroad hardly ends there.

Consider the growing infiltration of neo-Nazi groups within the armed services. In 2006 and again in 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which monitors racist and right-wing militia groups, concluded:

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization...

The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."

That zero-tolerance policy was put in place in the aftermath of the devastating Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 Americans, the largest death toll from a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland before 9/11.

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Lieberman wants probe of 'terrorist attack' at Ft. Hood

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Homeland Security Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman told Fox News' Chris Wallace that he wants the Department of Defense to launch an investigation into the shooting rampage at Ft. Hood. Lieberman said evidence indicates that Major Nidal Malik Hasan was probably a "self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist."

"If the reports that we're receiving of various statements he made, acts he took, are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism, and, therefore, if that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act and, in fact,it was the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on american soil since 9/11," Lieberman said Sunday.

Lieberman wants the Department of Defense to conduct a special investigation to see if the shootings could have been predicted. "While the Army and the FBI are conducting the criminal investigation about exactly what happened and what Dr. Hasan should be charged with, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense has a real obligation to convene an independent investigation to go back and look at whether warning signs were missed, both the stress he was under, but also the statements that he was making which really could lead people to believe that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist," said Lieberman.

"A couple of years ago, after a two-year investigation, my committee put out a report that said the new face of terrorism in America would not just be the attacks as 9/11 organized abroad and sending people in here, it would be people within this country, homegrown terrorists, self-radicalized, often over the internet, going to jihadist websites, and there's concern from what we know now about Hasan that, in fact, that's exactly what he was, a self-radicalized home grown terrorist," Lieberman concluded.


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Bill O'Reilly allows Fox News "Strategic Analyst" Lt. Col. Ralph Peters to go on a rant calling the shooting at Fort Hood "the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11" with little to no push back other than to say that Hasan may have had personal problems that had little to do with his religion and time will tell if his religion was the primary reason for the shooting spree. The race baiting manifested itself in full force when Peters made this statement which O'Reilly left un-countered.

Peters: Yeah, well first of all, the charge that you know, he was harassed and he broke, good god, I mean every soldier goes through a little harassment, but let me tell you from personal experience, if there’s harassment toward a minority or a religious minority in our military, man…your career is over for harassing. And this guy filed a charge that was found, there was no foundation to the charge. He’d been a trouble maker and a sad sack for a long time but because he was part of a protected species, a protected minority, the Army let him slide, just reassigned him, and what happened? 13 soldiers, fellow soldiers and civilian dead, 28 seriously wounded, a few more lightly wounded and what do we say?

Oops? No, it’s time to get rid of the PC culture in the Army, in society, in the media, and Bill I believe your viewers understand that this was an act of Islamist terror, and the media is not going to fool them and President Obama’s not going to fool them and at some point we need to quit focusing on “Oh how tormented this poor Maj. Hasan was, and remember, what…how many of the names do we know of the dead? What about the names of the wounded? Have the media covered the family lives that have been destroyed? The lives that have been destroyed? No. It’s all about poor Maj. Hasan and I am ready to puke.

O’Reilly: Alright Col. we appreciate that very much.

What sort of mindset does it take to be able to equate human beings to a "protected species”? This was truly just disgusting to watch. And while I do not disagree with some of what Peters said, such as paying attention to the fact that there are a whole lot of families out there going through what are some really horrific times right now because of this tragedy, calling this the “worst terrorist attack since 9-11” is utterly ridiculous. And I would hope that we are taking a better look at why this man snapped other than the cartoon-like stereotype that Peters attempted to paint here and using this as an excuse to demonize or dehumanize the Muslim community.

I have a lot of questions about just what happened to cause this tragic and very sad event. I don’t have a lot of faith that any of us will have those questions ever answered honestly any time soon. In the mean time, we can count on Fox News to draw their own conclusions if it means drumming up the fear factor and racial tensions in America for ratings.