Keeping Extremisms Out of the U.S. Military
By Jon Perr Thursday Nov 12, 2009 5:00pm
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.





