Hasan’s classmates at the Uniformed Services University, the military college where mass killer Nidal Malik Hasan recently took graduate courses, claimed to have repeatedly complained to their superiors about his persistent anti-American tirades.
According to the New York Post, one said he cautioned those in charge that the ranting Hasan was a “ticking time bomb” after he gave a presentation defending Islamic suicide bombers. Another classmate stated he voiced his complaints to two civilian faculty members and five officers.
Indeed, this student went so far in speaking truth to power (as the saying goes) that he commented in a document sent to Pentagon officials that fear in the military of being perceived as politically incorrect stifled an “intellectually honest discussion of Islamic ideology” in the ranks.
But this fear has had far more horrific consequences than merely suppressing forthright speech. If these professors and officers had honestly and courageously confronted the students’ concerns, Hasan could have been stopped in his tracks earlier, and the horrific massacre of our soldiers would not have taken place.
So it is that political correctness can do more than hinder open discourse. It can kill. It is to these students’ eternal credit that they attempted to surmount their superiors’ resistance to the warning signs about Hasan. And shame on the higher-ups for their cowardly and ultimately deadly denial.