As a result, thirteen people were murdered.
Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who murdered thirteen people in a jihad attack at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, wrote a series of letters to jihad mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki before his attacks. On May 31, 2009, Hasan wrote to al-Awlaki: “I heard a speaker defending suicide bombings as permissible and have been using his logic in debates to see how effective it really is.” He explained why he agreed with the unnamed speaker’s reasoning and added: “I don’t want to make this to long but the issue of ‘collateral damage’ where a decision is made to allow the killing of innocents for a valuable target. I[n] the Qur’an it states to fight your enemies as they fight you but don’t transgress. So, I would assume that suicide bomber whose aim is to kill enemy soldiers or their helpers but also kill innocents in the process is acceptable. Furthermore, if enemy soldiers are using other tactics that are unethical/unconscionable than those same tactics may be used.”
Even though Hasan was discussing why it was Islamically permissible to kill innocents in suicide attacks, the FBI decided that all this was “Not a Product of Interest.” The FBI agent in San Diego was monitoring Hasan’s communications was upset by this, and contacted the Washington Field Office (WFO) of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (TFO) to ask why. He was told that the Washington Field Office “doesn’t go out and interview every Muslim guy who visits extremist websites. Besides, this guy has a legitimate, work-related reasons to be going to these sites and engaging these extremists in dialogue. WFO did not assess this guy as a terrorism threat.”
The Washington Field Office also told the San Diego agent that Hasan was “politically sensitive for WFO.” How and why Hasan was “politically sensitive” was left unexplained, but it may have been a reference to how politically sensitive it would have been to investigate a Muslim who was a major in the U.S. Army. And certainly interviewing “every Muslim guy who visits extremist websites” would have entangled the bureau in charges of “Islamophobia” that it appeared intent on avoiding.
Despite this, in August 2013, when asked about the emails from Hasan to al-Awlaki, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that “given the context of the discussions and the situation that the agents and the analysts were looking at, they took appropriate steps.” This followed a long train of denial and obfuscation from government officials. Not long after the massacre, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared: “This was an individual who does not represent the Muslim faith.” The U.S. Army Chief of Staff, George Casey, declared: “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” And the U.S. government’s report on the massacre didn’t mention Islam even once.
Napolitano, Casey and the rest were just reflecting a political correctness that has been entrenched for years. On December 22, 2008, five Muslims were convicted of plotting to enter the U.S. Army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey and murder as many soldiers as they could. A sixth got five years in prison for weapons offenses, and the group became known as the Fort Dix Six.
Like Hasan’s, this was a jihad plot. One of the plotters, Serdar Tatar, told an FBI informant late in 2006: “I’m gonna do it….It doesn’t matter to me, whether I get locked up, arrested, or get taken away, it doesn’t matter. Or I die, doesn’t matter, I’m doing it in the name of Allah.” Another plotter, Mohamad Shnewer (the only American citizen among the convicted men), was caught on tape saying, “They are the ones, we are going to put bullets in their heads, Allah willing.”
The men trained “for jihad,” according to informant Besnik Bakalli, while on a trip to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, where they bought guns and practiced with them at firing ranges.
The plot was uncovered in January 2006 when two of the plotters entered a Circuit City outlet in New Jersey and asked a clerk to convert a videotape to DVD. The video showed men shooting automatic weapons and crying out, “Allahu akbar.”
Although the clerk, Brian Morgenstern, was alarmed, he hesitated over what to do. Years of politically correct indoctrination from the mainstream media made him wonder if it would be wrong to stop these men. Finally, he asked a coworker: “Dude, I just saw some really weird s—. I don’t know what to do. Should I call someone or is that being racist?” His concern was ironic, given that the Fort Dix plotters were all white European Muslims from the former Yugoslavia. In any case, Morgenstern’s coworker urged him to contact police, and he ultimately did.
Morgenstern’s hesitation was yet another indication of how successful American Muslim advocacy groups had been in portraying resistance to the global jihad as “racism,” and honest discussion of the elements of Islam that jihadists used to justify acts of violence and other acts in service of Islamic supremacism as “bigotry” – and ultimately, in confusing huge numbers of Americans about just what we were and are up against.
We can be grateful that Brian Morgenstern came forward anyway – but there is no way to know how many young people in similar positions decided that it was better to keep silent than to do anything that might appear to be “racist.” And since this idea was largely the policy of the U.S. government and still prevails among large swathes of the government and media, that possibility is likelier than ever.
Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer
