A liberal view of the shooting at Fort Hood

We live in different universes:

Liberal:  They still don’t know why he shot all those soldiers.

Me:  Of course they do.

Liberal:  What are you talking  about?

Me:  Come on.  They know it has to do with his . . . .

Liberal (interrupting):  Are you saying that he’s a sleeper cell?

Me:  No.  I’m saying that he’s a one man jihadist.  He shouted out “Allahu Akbar” as he was killing people.  He posted on web sites praising jihad and saying Americans are the enemy for killing Muslims.  The military and the FBI knew about him.  They’ve been watching him for six months.  They just didn’t do anything.

Liberal:  I don’t believe that.  You got that from your right wing wacko sites.

Me:  No.  I got it from the AP . . . .

Liberal (interrupting):  That’s not true.  I haven’t read anything about it.  That’s just bulls**t.

Here are some MSM, as opposed to “right wing wacko,” sources testifying to Hasan’s religious obsession and the FBI’s knowledge about that obsession (although I will say that, as to the latter, they hadn’t quite locked down the internet poster’s identity):

LA Times: “there were indications that Hasan was active on the Internet and that he had posted numerous inflammatory comments.”  [snip] “Hasan was devout. He worshiped at the mosque each day at 6 a.m., and often prayed there five times a day, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. Hasan’s devotion sometimes put him in conflict with the military.”  [snip] “He told students, ‘I’m a Muslim first and an American second’ . . .”

NPR:  Writes about the fact that Hasan was on probation for proselytizing about his religion.

CBS News/AP:  “His name appears on radical Internet postings. A fellow officer says he fought his deployment to Iraq and argued with soldiers who supported U.S. wars. He required counseling as a medical student because of problems with patients.”  [snip]  “At least six months ago, Hasan came to the attention of law enforcement officials because of Internet postings about suicide bombings and other threats, including posts that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades.”  [snip]  “On a form filled out by those seeking spouses through a program at the mosque, Hasan listed his birthplace as Arlington, Virginia, but his nationality as Palestinian, Khan said.   ‘I don’t know why he listed Palestinian,’ Khan said, ‘He was not born in Palestine.'”

Washington Post:  “Law enforcement officials also faced questions about whether they had missed possible warning signs. Six months ago, investigators came across Internet postings, allegedly by Hasan, that indicated sympathy for suicide bombers and empathized with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, and another source, said investigators never confirmed whether Hasan was the author of the postings and did not pursue the matter.”

What the above means is that, even though the MSM is reporting about Hasan’s “issues,” all that my liberal friend absorbed is the media facile and ridiculous conclusion — a conclusion totally at odds with the facts the reporters themselves were uncovering — that nobody had the slightest idea why Hasan did what he did.

Let me go back to Mark Steyn:

Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions — flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own — taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn.

But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An army psychiatrist, Major Hasan was an American, born and raised, who graduated from Viriginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, which works out to the best part of half a million dollars’ worth of elite education. But he opposed America’s actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and made approving remarks about jihadists on American soil. “You need to lock it up, Major,” cautioned his superior officer, Col. Terry Lee.