CASEY STRIKES OUT

Dorothy Rabinowitz:

“We don’t yet know the motive for the shootings.”

What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. …

Victim of deployment, [victim] of the Army, [victim] of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike …the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes? [...]

The thesis then: Maj. Hasan’s mental stress, provoked by [listening to] the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could. Let’s try putting that one before a jury.

By Sunday morning, Gen. George Casey Jr., Army chief of staff, confronted questions put to him by ABC’s George Stephanopolous—among them the matter of the complaints about Maj. Hasan’s anti-American tirades that were made by fellow students in military classes, as well as other danger signs ignored by officials when they were reported, apparently for fear of offense to a Muslim member of the military.

These were speculations, Gen. Casey repeatedly cautioned. We need to be very careful, he explained, “We are a very diverse army.” Mr. Stephanopolous then helpfully summarized matters: This case then was either a case of premeditated terror—or the man just snapped.

The general was not about to address such questions. He was there to recite the required pieties, and describe the military priorities . . . which are, it appears, a concern above all for the sensitivities of a diverse army, a concern so great as to render even the mention of salient facts out of order, as “speculation.’” “This terrible event,” Gen. Casey noted, “would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.”

To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.

As psychiatrists like Doc Hasan say, we’re regressing. We’re going backwards. We’re listening to the dis-reporters as they dis-report the anti-News, actually subtracting from the sum of human knowledge, leaving us knowing less than when we began.

I don’t like calling for General Casey to be fired. I’m sure he’s a patriot of the highest order. But he’s eaten up with Political Correctness and his troops are dying from it.

If an army was attacked repeatedly from a certain direction, and the general in charge kept insisting the fire was coming from a different direction, we would remove that general. Well, the army is being repeatedly harmed by PC Insanity and Gen. Casey keeps insisting the incoming fire is the solution, not the problem.

Yes; it’s “friendly fire” called up on the military by liberal politicians whom the voters have inflicted on our military services. For example, when the Obama Administration couldn’t rebuild the Berlin Wall like it wanted, it settled for resurrecting the Gorelick Wall–forbidding agencies to talk to one another out of a concern for Terrorist’s Rights. Allahpundit:

[The Pentagon] didn’t know about his e-mails to jihadbot preacher Anwar al-Aulaqi, thanks to the joint terrorism task force’s moronic rules barring information-sharing with other government agencies by its members without task force approval.

The Hill:

“When they withhold information, you always start asking questions,” Hoekstra told Fox News. “That’s what raises red flags. What do they know that they don’t want us to know?“

A: The name. The name of the Obama official who let Hasan send e-mails to osama.cave.

And the simple truth; this was an act of Islamist terrorism. To flee from this simple truth is to flee from reality. Psychiatrists have a phrase for this kind of psychosis:

“the highest levels of our government“.