There are devastating and important things happening in the news. Lest we forget, though: We are still in a war against Islamic Terrorism. And it still happens in America. November is not so far away that it deserves forgetting or whitewashing: An Arab terrorist named Nidal Hasan went to a health-care center, in a fort — at an Army base — in Texas, and opened fire killing 14 people while he shouted “Allahu Akbar.” But you would not know this if you read the Pentagon Report on the massacre released Friday.
Titled, “Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood,” this 80-plus page report mentions the words “Islam” and “Muslim” not once. Not once. It refers to Hasan as a “gunman.” As Ralph Peters put it, the report is “not about what happened at Fort Hood.” And “It avoids entirely the issue of why it happened.”
You can read that “low self-esteem, depression, and anger are tied to many different types of violence” in the report. You can read about “workplace violence” and “disgruntled employees” in the report. You can read about “Motivations for domestic terrorism” such as “animal rights, “white supremacy,” and “religious intolerance” thrown in on equal par among other factors that simply were not in play here in the report. And you can read the grand conclusion that “Religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor; most fundamentalist groups are not violent, and religious-based violence is not confined to members of fundamentalist groups.”
But you would be reading a complete and total whitewash. You’d be reading a lie of a report. But that is what the Pentagon has produced.
Here was a situation where an Islamist reached out to Islamist imams like Anwar Awlaki who has worked with other terrorists, including 9/11 hijackers. Where he had a business card that read “Soldier of Allah,” Where he yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire on fellow soldiers and Americans. Where he delivered a lecture and said “non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire.” Where he told his neighbor the morning he set off on his rampage that “I’m going to do good work for God.” Where he said his allegiance was “to sharia law” not “American law” when asked by his colleagues. Where his classmates said “no one would . . . have trusted him with anything.”
And yet he was made a major. And yet he was educated by the U.S. military. And yet he was kept in the U.S. military. And he then went to war with the United States.
You want to save time and money? Dispense with these reports from on high. Here’s the report I’d write and I can do it on less than one page: An Islamic terrorist was raised in the United States and given a pass throughout his professional career in the United States military. His allegiance was not to his country but to his radical religion. He told his colleagues of this again and again. He didn’t set off signals, he set off sirens. And nothing was done. The military leadership didn’t take his words seriously, even as we were at war with people saying the exact same things he was saying. And the culture of the Army that coddled him was too well-represented by the Army chief of staff who, after the rampage, said “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”
It was this thinking that led to us keeping Major Hasan in the Army and that diminished force protection. It was this culture that allowed a terrorist into the Army. It was this political correctness that led to the deaths of 14 innocents. And if you want to prevent another tragedy like this, you must end this infection of the mindset. I call it a tragedy because it was preventable. That it was not prevented is a shame on our institutions and indicative of a preemptive cultural surrender that I never thought would affect the U.S. military but, sadly, dangerously, has.
But the solution to these problems remains elusive because the military will not even mention the problem. And that, as Winston Churchill once put it, is why we still have a “Gathering Storm” coming, and not a near-victory in this, the Global War Against Islamic Terrorism.
– William J. Bennett is host of Morning in America and a fellow at the Claremont Institute.