An apparent Muslim jihadist strikes again — this time at Texas’ Fort Hood.

We’ve all heard about yesterday’s tragedy at Fort Hood military base in Texas. At 1:30 p.m., army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan went on a rampage, targeting fellow soldiers and others for destruction at the base’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center and adjacent Howze Theater. Using two semi-automatic handguns, Hasan claimed 13 lives and wounded 31 people before being shot multiple times by local police (it appears the other soldiers weren’t armed). The gunman was then taken into custody and brought to a local hospital. It’s said his life is not in danger. 

While there’s no “official” word on Hasan’s motives, it’s not hard to connect the dots. A man of Jordanian descent and a pious Muslim, the major’s loyalties didn’t seem to lie with the nation he’d sworn to protect. Instead, he had often expressed support for Islamic jihadists, once saying that Muslims needed to “rise up” against the aggressors (presumably the U.S. and the West in general). Expanding on this, Philip Sherwell at the Telegraph reports on the testimonials of retired officer and former colleague of Hasan’s Col. Terry Lee, writing:

 [Lee stated that Hasan] “said Muslims should stand up and fight the aggressor and that we should not be in the war in the first place.” He [Lee] said that Maj Hasan said he was “happy” when a US soldier was killed in an attack on a military recruitment centre in Arkansas in June. An American convert to Islam was accused of the shootings.

Col Lee alleged that other officers had told him that Maj Hasan had said “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Time Square” in New York.

Chron.com provides more pieces of the dark puzzle, writing, “Federal law enforcement officials told the AP that Hasan had come to their attention at least six months ago because of Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats. . . . One of the Web postings that authorities reviewed is a blog that equates suicide bombers with a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades.”

But the spark that seemed to ignite this powder keg of Islamist sentiment was Hasan’s impending deployment to Iraq, something his cousin Nader Hasan said was “probably his worst nightmare.” Given this, did Hasan decide that he’d prefer to fight Americans on our soil than jihadists on Iraq’s?

If this question smacks of just a bit too much conjecture, note that it’s at least a logical conclusion. This lies in stark contrast with the musings of some in mainstream media, who wasted no time painting Hasan as a victim. For instance, Kenyon Wallace writing at NationalPost.com theorized about “post traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) and mentioned how Hasan had supposedly been harassed by other officers because of his “Middle Eastern ethnicity.” Yet if PTSD was a factor in this case, it must have been pre traumatic stress disorder because the major had never seen battle. As for harassment, a better definition of it is expressing anti-American, Islamist views in the military and having the attitude that invariably attends them. Thus, a more logical conclusion here is that any negativity experienced by Hasan was not harassment but a response. Because if you insult people, they tend to respond in kind.

Is this conjecture? It’s more like proper profiling. But whatever the case, there’s a larger issue here to discuss than Major Hasan.

Driven by political correctness and, in certain cases, a sincere although misguided effort to calm the waters, we’ll no doubt hear the obligatory pronouncements about how “Islam is a peaceful religion.” Now, I’ll make no attempt to prove here that Islam isn’t peaceful. But I will demonstrate that its secular defenders really don’t have the foggiest idea whether it’s peaceful or not.

Let’s start by understanding that religion is not by definition peaceful any more than political ideologies are. In fact, for most of man’s history, the norm was not “Love thy neighbor,” but something closer to the Aztec’s feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl, in whose name worshippers would sacrifice thousands of victims a year, tearing their hearts out while they were still alive and hanging their body parts in the marketplace. Of course, the widespread practice of such barbarity is now just a memory. Yet, if yesterday’s mainstream religion was not by definition peaceful, does today’s have to be?

Moderns in the West certainly want to believe this is the case. In fact, having lost their faith and wanting people of different ones in their multi-religious societies to get along, they go even further and embrace that unwritten contract stating that all faiths are morally equal. Yet this is an incorrect and destructive idea.

Since different religions espouse different values, not all religions can be morally equal unless all values are so (this idea is moral relativism). Yet, if all values are equal, how could peacefulness be better than barbarity? This is why any agenda based on relativism will always collapse upon itself.

Also remember that relativism is a package deal, and one of its corollaries is that even the darkest ideologies — oh, let’s say, such as Nazism — are no worse than liberalism. After all, like different religions, different ideologies espouse different values. And if all values are morally equal....

Another thing we often hear is, “I’ve known many Muslims who are wonderful people; the radicals have simply hijacked their religion.” Yet, at best, this is a defense of those particular individuals, not what ostensibly is their faith.

I would ask you, who has hijacked what? What if the “radicals” are the true believers? In other words, before we can make the determination that they’re the hijackers, we must know what definitive Muslim teaching is so we can know what Islam actually is. Otherwise, we’re simply using circular logic, saying that since Islam truly must be peaceful, those who are peaceful must represent true Islam. In reality, the most the faith’s secular defenders can really say is “not enough data.”

This is an important point. Remember that most in the West practice religion in only a lukewarm, Christmas-and-Easter fashion. And whatever you think about any faith, it’s silly to draw conclusions — good or bad — based on those who are only nominally part of it. For example, the majority of American Catholics may believe in using artificial contraception, but this doesn’t mean the practice represents Church teaching.

In point of fact, it is silly to assume that “radicals” cannot define a faith. After all, a true believer in any religion will hold beliefs the secular world considers radical. And radicalism isn’t necessarily bad, as you can be radically right as well as radically wrong. The first abolitionist was thought a radical.

At the end of the day, religious-equivalency doctrine is fantasy. It’s much as when you have two little boys in the schoolyard who, in an effort to avoid conflict, each agree to not say that his daddy can beat up the other’s daddy. Except, there’s one difference: Their suspension of reality isn’t dangerous.

It’s time for us to grow up and seek facts, not fantasies. After all, the latter are why Nidal Malik Hasan was promoted to major in a military whose country he held in utter contempt.     

Selwyn Duke is a columnist and public speaker whose work has been published widely online and in print, on both the local and national levels. He has been featured on the Rush Limbaugh Show, at WorldNetDaily.com, in American Conservative magazine, is a contributor to AmericanThinker.com and appears regularly as a guest on the award-winning, nationally-syndicated Michael Savage Show. Visit his Website.

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JonnyVain said:

	... Once again, you've summed up all the relevant questions and points and portrayed them in a way that leaves almost no contention. It's utterly disgusting that the media would portray Hasan as a victim after he killed 13 unarmed people.
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November 06, 2009
Votes: +10

RP said:

... It is becoming tiresome listening to the excuses, time after time, as to why some Muslim committing some atrocity is not doing so for any jihadist reason. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. In the thinking of moral relativity, there are no absolutes, no right or wrong. Aristotle proposed The Law of Non-Contradiction. What this says is that opposite claims of truth cannot both be true. For example, atheism and theism cannot both be true. The Law of Excluded Middle asserts that there is no middle. This means, for the previous example, one or the other (atheism or theism) is true, but not both, and there is no in between. These laws extend far beyond just the question of whether or not God exists, but to every aspect of moral belief. Moral relativism falls far short of meeting the requirements for rational thought.

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November 06, 2009
Votes: +9

DDW said:

	Once again Here is what the Bible says about Ishmael, the father of the nations from which came Islam: "And he will be a wild donkey of a man, his hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand will be against him; and he will live to the east of his brothers". Genesis 16:12 (NASB).
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November 06, 2009
Votes: +5

DDW said:

	Also I never did understand how there could absolutely be no absolutes. So much for the folly of relativism.
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November 06, 2009
Votes: +4

Lee Gonzales said:

Analyzing the MSM spin meisters We have a shrink who needed a shrink due to anti- Muslim animosity in the military ranks. He attended a Muslim mosque and wore his military uniform to services not unlike his commander in chief who never wore an army uiform but who, nonetheless, is not shy about using a deadly weapon (the entire US government) to make a point by ordering the US military to fire on unarmed and innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. The spin doctors of the media will feed us propaganda as to why we need gun control and why we need to be more attuned to multiculturalism. We can not allow, or even recognize that America is a Christian nation. It is this Jingoist Christian attitude that caused the Muslim to go haywire. It was anger stoked by the macho pride of Christians; their pride of Christian soldiers who have fought and died for what they believe to be for ‘God, family and country.’ Therefore, we must do away with nations’ military uniforms and use one uniform for all the world’s soldiers- the UN uniform. The spin-miesters will opine that Americans must go along with their ‘expert’ opinion that from now on America's new slogan be "In secular we Trust." The headshrinker did not have permission to carry a gun on base and neither did his fellow soldiers who were shot while standing in line for another kind of deadly shot. What if they all had been armed? Wouldl he have been so inclined? Mao was right- political power does fly out the barrel of a gun and it's a cardinal principle that in order to hold onto power that only the government have the privelege to release the political power out of that barrel. Summing up the Media spin doctors’ prescription: No guns in private hands; No Jesus in the public square, and horrah for the NWO.

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November 06, 2009
Votes: +5

Conservatarian said:

	... An article in the Los Angeles Times states that only one of the firearms used was a semi-automatic. What's Selwyn Duke's source that both were semi-autos?
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November 06, 2009
Votes: -1

Jihadist, Comsymp or just plain nutcase?, Lowly rated comment [Show]

Lee Gonzales said:

"Moment of silence" and what make and model were the guns? Is it important to know if both of the weapons were semi-automatic or just one? A court of law will bring out those facts. Is it relative to the JBS Newsfeed story? Will the case be stronger if the author nailed the make, model, caliber and type of weapon before filing the story? The author either made a mistake or he is correct and the source you heard this from is incorrect. How does that fit in with the bigger issue of realtivism, philosophical arguments, political correctness, false solutions by liberals and the whole issue surrounding gun control that Mr. Duke brings out in this piece? On the bigger issue, we have a silly and stupid Speaker of the House of Representatives who doesn't have the decency to ask her fellow congressmen to offer a prayer for the soldiers and their families; to pray to God in the name of Jesus. All she offers to the dead is a "moment of silence." Those soldiers have been silenced by a murderer and the SOTH offers more silence and nitpickers think it's important to give an accurate description of the weapons.

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November 06, 2009
Votes: +6

rprew said:

	... "Jihadist, Comsymp or just plain nutcase?" I don't see where any one of those can exclude the others.
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November 06, 2009
Votes: +4

Will Grigg said:

A sounder perspective on the Ft. Hood massacre Here's Lew Rockwell's comment about Hasan's desire to avoid participating in the murder of fellow Muslims overseas: "If only he had been allowed to change his job, as in any normal human endeavor, the supposed shooter at Ft. Hood might have left in peace. Only the military claims the right to kill you or jail you for wanting to change your job, so the man was held against his will. This does not, needless to say, justify shooting others, here or overseas. He should simply have left the army. As should all soldiers destined for immoral and illegal wars."

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November 06, 2009
Votes: +0

John Barbour said:

The Lion Has Roared DDW You cannot apply the Genesis 16 passage to Moslems unless you are willing to concede that the Koran and Islam are correct. It is from the Islamic tradition alone that the Ishmaelites are known as the Banu Ismail. From the Bible's perspective, the Ishmaelites disappear and are assimilated into other tribes shortly after the time of David. Psalm 83:6 is the last we hear of them. Islam has influenced Christian theology in at least two detrimental ways. 1. It brought justification for the use of the sword and 2. It presented God as a Diety who was bound to His own Decree and created a fatalistic worldview. Christians need to repent of these two false doctrines (take the log out of our own eye) before we can see clearly to take the log out of Islam. May the true loving and faithful God speed us to that day when we will behold Him as He truly is and because of that revelation turn our swords into plowshares and our spears into prunning hooks.

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November 07, 2009 | url
Votes: -2

DDW said:

	To John Barbour You are wrong. Your sophistry does not work on me. Stop wasting your time.
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November 07, 2009
Votes: +1

Peter Steele said:

Russian KGB-FSB-Yevegny Primakov-Communist Muslims It was Lenin's evil plan to murder as many of his own people and surround our nation with Marxist-Leninist enemies. The KGB in the 1960's started this Islamic Radicalism to destroy Israel and our wonderful country. Yevegny Primakov was an evil genius in this mess and the sooner our country stops kowtowing to Russia and China even if Sohlsenitsyn loves his Russian people and Sakharov prevented the USSR from going to war with us. We have Communist-Muslims in Russia as Litvinenko and Polikovskaya insists.

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November 07, 2009
Votes: +3

Eddington said:

	Grigg is right. What is JBS.org, formerly known as The John Birch Society, doing throwing red meat like this to the blood lusting neo-cons and their amen corner? Get US Out - of Iraq and Afghanistan.
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November 07, 2009
Votes: -3

mary ann oyanib said:

massacre in fort hood texas Its so sad that before anyone else find out that muslim radical are living amongst us. Tragic things has to happen before anyone else hopefully would wake up for the truth. Nidal is one of those successful carrier that fulfill muslim radical agenda and it does not matter if he is american citizen or not. He has to push through, because this is what he promise to allah and other radical motive that he is loyal to. His excuses of what he stands for is making me sick. But because of the crooked system we have that anyone could claim anything to fullfill their loyalty is despicable. We need to stand up for the truth and believe in one god which is christ the lord. Those people that harbor and support terrorism aught to be shifted in the country where they belong.

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November 07, 2009 | url
Votes: +2

Lee Gonzales said:

Eddington Are the writers who post their articles at JBS.org suppossed to write as if the history of Islam is a history of non-violence? The Islamic attitude extends to members of their own families:http://thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/family/2200-rifqa-bary-in-danger-again Our culture and civilization is here today due to the actions taken by our ancestors who fought and defeated Islam's armies in battles like Lepanto.http://thenewamerican.com/index.php/history/world/2047-armada-of-the-cross America's problems stem from a master conspiracy that has taken control of the people's government and are invollving us in one illegal UN directed "no-win" war after another beginning with Korea and you complain about a branding campaign by the management.

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November 08, 2009
Votes: +3

Still Free said:

Bring back the MPs (and not foreign-born MPs) And this monster was on a watch list? How much more "warning" do authorities need? Am I wrong, or does this sound a little like 9-11? Thank God for the many saved lives due to the Civilian Cop, who faced an EVIL monster head on, who walked fearlessly into the jaws of death, who got the job done swiftly and methodically, and miraculously, who lived to tell about it! An American Hero, who will join the ranks of Captain Sullenberger. God Bless these two brave souls!

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November 08, 2009
Votes: +3

RCozine said:

Lots of questions to be answered It's too early to say anything for certain, but the Fort Hood story so far causes me to have many questions. First it was reported that there were three shooters, then two, then one. At first Hasan was reported dead and then hours later he was alive. How convenient that Hasan paraded around the convenience store in his traditional Arab dress and cap the same day as his rampage. How odd that he was reportedly under investigation by the FBI for statements he supposedly made on the internet and that it was widely known that he was critical of US foreign policy. I also find it difficult to believe that one man could shoot 40+ people with two handguns. Like I said, it's too early for any conclusions. But if this was a psyop, and if Hasan was an agent provocateur, and this mass murder was designed to fan the flames of religious hatred and provide justification for even greater military and police state measures in this country, in addition to taking attention away from two increasingly unpopular wars as well as treasonous "health care" legislation, it is working like a charm.

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November 08, 2009
Votes: +3

RichardR369 said:

	Afghanistan/Iraq JBS has stated for years that we shouldn't be invading other countries as this is unconstitutional for one and secondly, has proven to drive up terrorist recruits as we have proven ourselves to be the 'Great Satan' by invading other countries. Let's get out of Afghanistan/Iraq because it's Constitutional.
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November 09, 2009
Votes: +6

tuxkabin said:

Sad day in America I watch today as the soldiers sat at Forthood. Not one person said a word about the snipers on the roofs watching these soldiers or in fact who were the snipers really watching. I am blown away that when Obama made his day view that all of the American soldiers did not get up and walk away. I find it so hard to believe that the soldiers at Forthood did not fight back at this Jhad instead laid down on the floor to be shot in the backs. Most of all I cannot believe that any soldier would have shown up today without a weapon.They don't make them like they use too. I carry ever where I go. The Army has no bullets and the soldiers cannot be trusted to have a gun, but they can only have guns when it is time for this government to have them killed. but everyone else can have a gun. What is someone afraid that a soldier might shoot himself in the foot. And I have ask this question did anyone notice besides me that only white people got shot? And how come the lady who was having a baby that got shot and they both died no one even counted them both nor did the news speak about this guy killing children too this day. I have no respect for our US soldiers untile they stand down under this Usurper.You can't fix stupid.

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November 10, 2009
Votes: +1