Fort Hood Shooting an Act of Islamist Terror? A Little Honesty Please

If you can heal the symptoms but not affect the cause
Then you can't heal the symptoms

- Tom Marshal, Lyric from Phish song 'Sand'

It's probably a bit odd to quote a lyric from the least political band ever in a very political piece but it's very appropriate in this case. The mainly left-wing American mainstream media and our current administration have refused to even contemplate what I think most intelligent Americans know to be obvious: That Nidal Malik Hasan committed the worst massacre on an army base on U.S. soil as a result of his holding a radical Islamist ideology. If that's not terrorism, I don't know what is? And what do we gain by playing some idiotic semantic game, as the Obama administration would like?

So what's the big deal? A murder is a murder, right? And if what happened on Thursday in Texas was terrorism, why isn't the Oklahoma State Bombing or Columbine or any number of other incidents?

Well first of all, I'd argue any incident committed out of an ideology that preaches hatred and mass murder is indeed an act of terror. The notion that only a muslim can commit terrorism is downright offensive; anyone can commit an act of terror and the ideologies that can lead someone to commit so horrible an act are varied. In my experience, the people who commit these sort of acts within open and free societies rely on an ideology of some sort that demonizes large swaths of their fellow members of society and that demands vengeance and mass murder as a result. So there's nothing qualitatively worse about radicalized Islam then say the far-right ideology that led Timothy McVeigh to murder hundreds in Oklahoma City. It doesn't matter whether the terrorist acted alone or as part of some larger group. It's the ideology and targeting of a specific national, religious, or sexual group or orientation simply because they're members of that group that makes an act a 'terrorist' act. (Thus, a military targeting fighters that accidentally catches civilians in the crossfire is not committing a terror act.)

That being said, to deny the background that led to this most recent attack, to use Orwellian news-speak as the NY Times has in refusing to even identify the shooter's religion for over a day after the attack and fail to report details like that he screamed 'Allah Akbar' as he opened fire is downright dangerous and extremely dishonest (not that I expect honesty from the media ;-). Because it places a barrier to preventing this sort of act in the future. As in the AA's 12-step program, the first step to arriving at a solution is admitting you have a problem and identifying very specifically what that is.

As Mark Steyn wrote in the National Review this weekend in his excellent piece:

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.

If you can't even admit that ideology exists and is at the root of this sort of act, then you can't fight it or stop it. And if this root cause isn't properly addressed, I assume this sort of act will happen again and again on U.S. soil. And President Obama will be digging his own political grave, because mainstream media denials aside, the American people are pretty perceptive when it comes to this sort of thing and they're gonna want to know why their men in uniform are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and strategic ignorance in the face of a threat that won't simply go away because we pretend it doesn't really exist.