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The Fort Hood Massacre: Why the Democrats Won't Call it "Terrorism"

"Excerpt: "Hasan — an Islamic man of Middle Eastern descent responsible for having perpetrated a religiously motivated act of mass murder — was the offspring of the same ideology — "political correctness" — that birthed President Obama and which remains the backdrop of each of his thoughts and deeds."]

Intellectual Conservative
November 19, 2009
by Jack Kerwick

Despite the availability of rapidly mounting information concerning the Fort Hood shooting and Major Hassan, the President seems not just uninterested in following the scent to which the evidence compellingly points, but thoroughly interested in throwing the rest of us off of it.

As I write this, it has been just over a week since an Islamic army Major and psychiatrist opened fire on his comrades, murdering fourteen and wounding over forty. In spite of the endless supply of cautionary notes about drawing hasty judgments that our President and others seem determined to continue delivering to us, by now the ignorance regarding this event that was our condition when it initially occurred has been considerably abated.

We know this much about Major Hassan: he was a committed Muslim who preferred to identify himself in terms, not of his American citizenship, but his religious affiliation; he believed that his commitments as a Muslim conflicted with his commitments as an American; he attended regularly the same mosque frequented by a couple of the 9/11 hijackers; he equated "suicide bombers" with medal of honor recipients; he passionately and not infrequently expressed, not just indignation, but outrage over America's military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan; to show that such outrage was justified, he unfailingly appealed to his Islamic faith; his animus toward the United States was no secret to several of his colleagues, but the fear of being charged with "Islamophobia" prevented them from pursuing the matter further; he attempted to contact terrorist organizations; and finally, right before gunning down over fifty members of the military, he screamed in Arabic, "God is great!"

In the case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the Cambridge police, President Obama knew but a fraction of what we know of the blood bath for which Major Hassan is responsible, and yet, in spite of having acknowledged at the time his ignorance of the facts, the President couldn't resist condemning the police for having "acted stupidly," and suggested that a consideration of the history of the relationship between racial minorities and law enforcement agents in America rendered more plausible than not the charge of "racial profiling" that Gates leveled against the officers who eventually arrested him.
Now, though, in spite of the availability of rapidly mounting information concerning the Fort Hood shooting and Hassan, the President seems not just uninterested in following the scent to which the evidence compellingly points, but thoroughly interested in throwing the rest of us off of it.

The divergence between Obama's reactions to these two cases is beyond coincidence, and collectively they intimate one fundamental reason for the President's and his supporters' apparent resolve to insure that the Fort Hood shooting is not perceived as an instance of Islamic terror. A caller to one of the nationally syndicated radio talk shows that I regularly listen to just today blasted the host for refusing to blame the President for the Fort Hood massacre. The host, though relentlessly critical of Obama's response to the situation, weathered his caller's tirade and steadfastly refused to impute blame to the President for the shooting itself. Yet the host was mistaken, for Obama is not without a share of the culpability for this outrage, but not because he is the President — I don't see how any President could have averted an event of this kind — but because the ideology that he enthusiastically embraces, an ideology on whose breast he nursed throughout most of his life, is the Dr. Frankenstein to Hassan's monster.

The ideology to which I refer could conceivably be variously described, but because time and space constraints preclude a thorough quest for a label that best suits it, I will simply call it "political correctness," a name that, for whatever its many shortcomings may be, at least has the virtues of being at once succinct and familiar.

Although the casual observer can't but view any given instance of "political correctness" as a patent specimen of nonsense, if we would but accept the invitation to interrogate its individual manifestations so as to penetrate the more general ideas from which they arise, we would soon discover that when considered not by itself but within the context of the overall pattern or Gestalt to the amplification of which it contributes, the impression of incoherence reveals itself as an illusion, for the worldview of "political correctness" is as comprehensive as any. This, though, is not to say that it is nuanced. Indeed, far from it, for it is my contention that in addition to considerations of another kind to which I will attend momentarily, the ideology of "political correctness" possesses a simplicity from which its devotees derive a profound aesthetic satisfaction.

According to the "politically correct" vision of it, the world can roughly be divided into two forces, the forces of Light, Reason, and Virtue, on the one hand, and, on the other, the forces of Darkness, Irrationality, and Evil. Unlike in some other comparably dualistic visions where the competing cosmic forces were either impersonal entities like, say, the Yen and the Yang, or warring deities, the rival forces in the vision of the "politically correct" are classes of human beings.

"Political correctness" is essentially a version of Mannicheism, only here the forces of Goodness are comprised of, well, everyone who is not a white, Christian, heterosexual man. The latter is the Enemy, the Oppressor, to whom all of the world's imperfections, and especially its tragedies and travesties, stand as effect to cause. The white, Christian, heterosexual man, given his proclivity for unspeakable violence — his "racism," "sexism," "homophobia," "Islamophobia," "imperialism," "colonialism," "xenophobia," "nativism," "specieism," and "ageism," in short, his presumption to walk like a god among mere mortals — must be destroyed if our planet is to be spared.

Now, the destruction that the agents of Virtue desire to visit upon the Evil One is not necessarily literal, but although it is not a lust for something as brutal as bloodshed that motivates them, their goal is not for that any less cruel. The aim of the "politically correct" is twofold: they want to first divest the Enemy of his very identity and, secondly, substitute for it one of their own making. In other words, it isn't literally the white, Christian, heterosexual man, whose annihilation is desired, but the white, Christian, heterosexual man as he has always known himself.

The critic who objects that there is no proponent of "political correctness" who, even to himself, would admit to having such a vision or entertaining such desires speaks truthfully. However, there are two replies that conjointly, at least, put this objection out to pasture. The first is that the criticism itself reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of an ideology, for is it not of the essence of an ideology that it functions largely at an unconscious level? Until it becomes the object of reflection, and even then, the assumptions and implications of any given worldview, by virtue of being ubiquities that, as such, are taken for granted, subsist unnoticed: we so easily recognize the speck of ideology in our brothers' eyes while failing to take stock of the beam of ideology in our own.

Secondly, it is only in light of a vision on the order of the kind whose features I have delineated that such otherwise bizarre phenomena as the transformation of those figures traditionally viewed as heroes of Western civilization into villains; comprehensive preferential treatment for racial, religious, sexual minorities, and women; and the creation of additional penalties for offenses committed against these "protected classes," including the criminalization of thought itself in the invention of "the hate crime," acquire some measure of intelligibility. All of these events coincide seamlessly with the emergence of "political correctness" as an identifiable frame of ideas.

So, in addition to the aesthetic value that "political correctness" derives from the tidiness and simplicity of its vision, the belief that one is on the side of the angels in a grand, perpetual war for the salvation of all that is worthwhile invests it as well with a magisterial moral value, and it makes it impossible for one whose self-conception is tantamount to that of an angel's not to view oneself as vastly morally superior to one's enemies. The psychic and emotional benefits to be reaped from such self-regard can't be overstated. But there are other benefits that accrue to the adherents of the ideology of "political correctness."

At least as alluring as the psychological rewards that subscription to "political correctness" supplies are its prospects of power. If it is legitimate to dissolve flesh and blood individuals into two abstract classes of Oppressors and Oppressed, and if Reason and Justice are understood as demanding, because it is the product of the Oppressor's machinations, the unraveling of the world as it currently is, then the guardians of this orthodoxy must be entrusted with an enormous fund of power the deployment of which they will forever be preoccupied. Hence, politicians — Democratic politicians, in particular — as well as academics and journalists — the overwhelming majority of whom are sympathetic to the Democratic party — are deeply invested in preserving, and strengthening the ideology of "political correctness" that psychologically and professionally sustains them.

Hasan — an Islamic man of Middle Eastern descent responsible for having perpetrated a religiously motivated act of mass murder — was the offspring of the same ideology — "political correctness" — that birthed President Obama and which remains the backdrop of each of his thoughts and deeds. Not only the President but virtually anyone and everyone else who holds positions of power in our world are now compelled to divert attention away from this ideology that they spared no expense in gorging themselves on throughout the years, an ideology from which they have plucked delectable fruits but which has now come home to roost in what could very well be the first terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11.

This is the second major reason why the President and his allies in politics and the media insist, against all considerations to the contrary, that Hasan was just a random "nut." Unfortunately, few people have raised this point, but raise it we must if we are to account for the rather peculiar, dogmatic resoluteness on the part of the President and Democrats generally to either explain away the Fort Hood shooting as an isolated event without a cause, or, in gross violation of the principle of Occam's Razor, to substitute for a much simpler cause more complex ones. Is it so implausible to think that the Democrats' determination to avoid the perception of Hasan as a "terrorist" just may be motivated by a paralyzing fear to avoid the perception that, after only a year of seizing the White House, they are responsible for having presided over the first terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11?

This, I contend, more than a fear of offending Muslims, and perhaps even more than their ideology of "political correctness," accounts for why the Democrats will not, cannot, acknowledge the Fort Hood shooting as an act of "terrorism."