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On November 5, 2009, U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan attended prayers at a mosque in Killeen, Texas. Returning home, he gave a neighbor a copy of the Qur’an and told her, “I’m going to do good work for God.” Later on the same day, he entered a center at Fort Hood in Texas where soldiers receive medical examinations before deploying overseas. Then, shouting “Allahu akbar” (Allah is greater, i.e., Islam is superior to other religions) he drew a pistol and began firing.
During his trial, prosecutors showed that several days before his attack, and even just a few hours before he started shooting, he searched the Internet for “jihad” and specifically for articles about Islamic jihadists and Muslim clerics calling for jihad attacks on Americans.
Yet despite these abundant indications that Hasan was engaged in act of Islamic jihad akin, albeit on a smaller scale, to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Obama’s Defense Department has classified Hasan’s shootings not as a terrorist act but as “workplace violence.”
Hasan himself contradicted this at his trial, when he pointedly registered his agreement with the prosecution’s contention that, unlike some others who had suddenly opened fire in public places, he hadn’t just suddenly snapped, or been overcome with an overwhelming paroxysm of rage: “I would like to agree with the prosecution that it wasn’t done under the heat of sudden passion. There was adequate provocation, that these were deploying soldiers that were going to engage in an illegal war.”
Nonetheless, the U.S. government initially ignored repeated requests from the victims’ families to reclassify the murders and make the victims eligible for the Purple Heart and other benefits that are normally accorded to combatants killed or injured in the line of duty, not approving these requests until 2015.
A foremost priority at Hasan’s trial seemed to be to obscure the fact that he was an Islamic jihadi. The military judge, Col. Tara Osborn, barred prosecutors from introducing evidence that Hasan corresponded with al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki and was inspired to carry out his attack by the murderous Muslim Sgt. Hasan Akbar. Osborn said that to introduce such evidence would “only open the door to a mini-trial” of Akbar, and lead to a “confusion of issues, unfair prejudice, waste of time and undue delay.”
Unfair prejudice against what or whom? Osborn didn’t say. Akbar was already convicted and Hasan admitted his murders, so it seemed unlikely that she meant unfair prejudice against either of them. But disallowing this evidence did obscure the Islamic character of Hasan’s motive, so the only way Osborn’s statement made sense was if she meant that that this evidence would have created “unfair prejudice” against Islam or Muslims – a strange concern for a military judge in a trial of a mass murderer inspired by Islam’s jihad doctrine.
In any case, Hasan’s was the oddest of murder trials, in which the murderer openly and repeatedly that he had committed the murders, and his motive was deemed irrelevant, with discussion of it severely circumscribed.
This disconnect from obvious reality grew ever wider. The Obama administration’s official unwillingness to face the full reality of the Islamic jihad was all-pervasive, affecting both foreign and domestic policy. Echoed in the establishment media, it contributed to an atmosphere in which Americans were less safe, and less informed about the threat they face, than ever before. And those who are informed about the threat, or who find themselves confronted by it in one form or another, are often intimidated into silence even today by the politically correct backlash that is sure to come against them if they dare to speak out.
Nidal Hasan’s own coworkers during his tenure as an Army psychiatrist illustrate how that intimidation works. Although his jihadist tendencies were well known, clearly fear of charges of “Islamophobia” prevented his Army superiors from acting upon signs of his incipient jihadist tendencies. Instead, they kept promoting him. AP reported in January 2010 that “a Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan’s medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.”
And so Hasan rose through Army ranks even as he justified suicide bombing and spouted hatred for America while wearing its uniform, and he did so with extraordinarily positive recommendations. In an evaluation dated March 13, 2009, just short of eight months before his jihad attack, Hasan’s superiors wrote that he displayed “outstanding moral integrity” and praised his project topic for his master’s of public health degree: “the impact of beliefs and culture on views regarding military service during the Global War on Terror.” They even praised him specifically as a Muslim, in passages that their authors must have remembered with stinging regret after his jihad murders: one said that he should be put into a position “that allows others to learn from his perspectives” and declared that his “unique insights into the dimensions of Islam” and his “moral reasoning” could be of “great potential interest and strategic importance to the U.S. Army.”
A July 1, 2009 report went even farther, saying that Hasan had “a keen interest in Islamic culture and faith and has shown capacity to contribute to our psychological understanding of Islamic nationalism and how it may relate to events of national security and Army interest in the Middle East and Asia.” Among his “unique skills” were listed “Islamic studies” and “traumatic stress spectrum psychiatric disorders.” The report concluded that “Maj. Hasan has great potential as an Army officer.” His murders were four months away.
Even while writing these effusive recommendations, Hasan’s superiors and those around him were aware of his pro-jihad statements, and were worried about them. “Yet no one in Hasan’s chain of command,” reports AP, “appears to have challenged his eligibility to hold a secret security clearance even though they could have because the statements raised doubt about his loyalty to the United States.”
The reason for the silence in the face of all these warnings is obvious. Hasan’s superiors were neither stupid nor incompetent. They no doubt knew what would have happened if they removed Hasan from his position or even simply reprimanded and disciplined him for his statements about Islam. Worse still, those who might have complained about Hasan would almost certainly have faced public abuse, media smearing by CAIR and ISNA as “Islamophobes,” and possibly even disciplinary action from their superiors. Leftist talk show hosts would have subjected them to nationally broadcast ridicule. All Army personnel would have been ordered into sensitivity training, perhaps run by CAIR itself.
This kind of scenario played out more than once, to the detriment of all Americans. If what is now called wokeness hadn’t had a stranglehold on the U.S. military, Nidal Hasan may never have been in a position to murder thirteen Americans.