The Fort Hood shooting *UPDATED*
I just heard about the Fort Hood shooting, and have nothing of my own to say. The New Editor, however, is watching closely and updating constantly.
Ed Driscoll also has running updates, as does Hot Air.
What I learned from a military friend is that, even though it’s a military base, the troops are not armed, leaving them as helpless as college or high school students.
Probably meaningless, but the one shooter who is named (of the three military shooters involved) is Major Malik Nadal Hasan. I’m sure the name is just a coincidence, and could as easily have been, say, Maj. Tom O’Malley, or Maj. Jerome Goldberg, or Maj. Lou Chan. And I’m sure it had nothing to do with anything that Hasan converted to Islam.
UPDATE: At JoshuaPundit, info comes through that it was one shooter, so not a conspiracy. My question for you: if it’s a lone gunman who shoots because his religious ideology dictates that he do so, is it still a Muslim terrorist attack? I say yes, but I’m sure the MSM will play the crazy soldier under stress angle. JoshuaPundit, by the way, using actual facts, asks the same question and, quite thoughtfully, comes up with the same answer.
I’d blog more, but Thursday afternoon and evening are serious carpool and family time.
UPDATE II: I’m hearing some back channel chat which makes this sound much more interesting than just a lone gunman. You’ll probably hear the same stuff before I wake up tomorrow (early, but California time). The one point I can tell you is that an ex-mil friend noted that this whole fear of deployment isn’t straight. The guy is a psychiatrist. Here or there, he’d be sitting on a couch. In other words, he would never be taking up weapons against fellow Muslims — but he was manifestly willing to take up weapons against fellow Americans.
UPDATE III: Since I’m getting links from my trackback at Hot Air, I feel it’s incumbent upon me to say something intelligent and coherent here. Here’s my try: The most dangerous enemy is always the Fifth Columnist, or the enemy within. Hasan wore the same uniform as the men (and women?) he shot. He slept in the same barracks, he had the same military training, he shared their pop culture. There was nothing alien about him. As these pictures hint, and as we know to be the case for all military installations, Ft. Hood is set up to repel the enemy from without. It has no mechanism to protect against the turncoat, the Benedict Arnold who nurses a private or ideological grievance.
I’ve also heard from back channels that people like Hasan have been an ongoing concern within the military. The fear inspired by political correctness, however, has meant that internal enforcement agencies (FBI, military police, etc.) have been afraid to act on their suspicions for fear of being tarred as racists or ideologues. This climate of PC fear must have increased dramatically since Obama’s justice department made it plain that it considered those who acted in defense of the U.S. as potential war criminals. In the topsy turvy world of Obama politics, it’s a worse sin to be politically incorrect than to be a terrorist. Our national security forces have read the tea leaves and, no matter how patriotic I’m sure they are, they’ve concluded that the sure risk to their career for being un-PC is greater than the potential risk of a terrorist attack from some psychiatrist or foot soldier somewhere in the South or the Midwest, or wherever else the next Muslim loony-toonz starts making noise on American soil.
UPDATE IV: The media will undoubtedly paint Hasan as a disaffected, frightened warrior (never mind that psychiatrists don’t go into war). Why do I say this? Because every Muslim attack in America (e.g., the shooter at the Jewish center in the North West, the crazy guy who ran down people in San Francisco, the D.C. sniper, the Home Depo car driver) is, according to the media, just a crazy person in motion. I’ve therefore got a syllogism for you:
All mass murderers are crazy.
All mass murderers who look to Allah and the Koran as their inspiration for mass murder are crazy.
All Muslims are therefore crazy.
It’s an utterly stupid syllogism, and it’s meant to be. I just wanted to highlight the inanity of a media that seeks desperately to avoid the fact that there’s a common denominator to a significant percentage of crazy mass murders in the U.S. Yes, we have random shooters (the Virginia Tech guy, the Amish killer, the Columbine killer), but we also have a collection of killers all of whom share precisely the same ideology: they’re murdering for Allah. That’s not crazy; that’s ideological.
