SOMEBODY CROSSED IT, YET NO ONE HAS BEEN FIRED

Why is that?

Noted Speech Criminal Mark Steyn:

[A]n opposition MP mused on whether it wouldn’t have been better to prohibit the publication of Mein Kampf.

“That analysis sounds as if it ought to be right,” I replied. “But the problem with it is that the Weimar Republic—Germany for the 12 years before the Nazi party came to power—had its own version of Section 13 and equivalent laws. It was very much a kind of proto-Canada in its hate speech laws. The Nazi party had 200 prosecutions brought against it for anti-Semitic speech. At one point the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Hitler from giving public speeches.”

And a fat lot of good it all did.

But still the old refrain echoes through the corridors of power: vigorous honest free speech will lead to mass murder unless we subject it to “reasonable limits.”

Actually, the opposite is true: a constrained and regulated culture policed by politically correct enforcers leads to slaughter. I’m not being speculative here, as Commissar Lynch is about my murderous prose style. It’s already happened, just a couple of weeks back. Thirteen men and women plus an unborn baby were gunned down at Fort Hood by a major in the U.S. Army. Nidal Hasan was the perpetrator, but political correctness was his enabler, every step of the way….

As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in U.S. history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit. And he gave the presentation to a roomful of fellow army psychiatrists and doctors. Some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And, when the question of whether then-Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic,” the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents.”

So instead he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood. And barely had he got to Texas when he started making idle chit-chat praising the jihadist murderer of two soldiers outside a recruitment centre in Little Rock.“This is what Muslims should do, stand up to the aggressors,” Major Hasan told his superior officer, Colonel Terry Lee. “People should strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square.”

In less enlightened times, Colonel Lee would have concluded that, being in favour of the murder of his comrades, Major Hasan was objectively on the side of the enemy. But instead he merely cautioned the major against saying things that might give people the wrong impression. Which is to say, the right impression.

This is your brain on political correctness.

“You need to lock it up, major,” advised the colonel.

But, of course, he didn’t. He could pretty much say what he wanted—infidels should have their throats cut, for example. Meanwhile, the only ones who felt any “need to lock it up” were his fellow psychiatrists, his patients, his teachers at the Uniformed Services University, officials at Walter Reed, and the brass at Fort Hood. So they locked it up for years, and now 14 people are dead.

And even when the slaughter had happened, much of the media found it easier to slander both the U.S. military and the general populace than to confront the evidence. The Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano professed to be most worried about an “anti-Muslim backlash” from the knuckledragging bozo citizenry she has the forlorn task of attempting to hold in check. This is the Jennifer Lynch argument: the priority is always some hypothetical atrocity waiting to happen…

…instead of the actual atrocity that’s already bleeding on your shoes.

Steyn closes:

Instead, asked “Who ya gonna believe—The Celebrate Diversity Handbook or your lyin’ eyes?”, more and more of us plump for the former, if only for a quiet life. Commissar Lynch has it exactly backwards: it’s the craven submission to political correctness, the willingness to leave your marbles with the Diversity Café hat-check girl, that leads to death—real death, with real corpses, from Texas to Ontario. And when the guy’s on the table firing wildly and screaming “Allahu akbar!”, the PC enforcers won’t be there for you.

Maj. Hasan’s Free Speech Rights were protected. Incredibly, unimaginably, irresponsibly protected, to the point of allowing him to openly plan enemy action with our enemies while authorities listened in and made excuses for him.

It was the Free Speech Rights of his colleagues that were repressed. It was unsafe for their careers to report what their lyin’ eyes were seeing. The PC enforcers effectively silenced the good guys and bought 1-800-JIHAD phone cards for the bad guy.

And those PC enforcers have names and job titles, even though the Ask-No-Questions Press is reliably not asking.

I’m not a super-smart journalist with an expense account and a secretary and an office and a J-School diploma on the wall and a Rolodex full of Washington’s finest leakers, but I’ve still got a question:

Shouldn’t whoever decided that Hasan chatting with al Qaeda was harmless be removed, so they can’t get more troops killed?