None dare call it submission

Sometimes out of tragedy can come great good. If it costs no more than 13 lives at Fort Hood finally to recognize and correct the systemic errors in our national understanding of, and response to, what animates Muslims who seek our destruction, the sacrifice of those who lost their lives will not have been in vain.

In the wake of their murders, it is now clear that the United States government has thus far failed utterly in these respects. To understand just how complete that failure has been, consider — based on the particulars of the case of the alleged shooter, Army Major Nihad Malik Hasan — what is now deemed permissible on the part of Muslim members of the armed forces:

• They can associate in person or via e-mail with known al-Qaida sympathizers and recruiters as long as some excuse can be found to construe such contacts as consistent with, for example, their “research.”
• They can attend mosques that promote the most virulently intolerant and supremacist theo-political-legal program — what authoritative Islam calls “Shariah” — which requires its adherents to engage in jihad (holy war).
• They can actively try to convert other servicemen and women to Shariah, including individuals whose service to their country has left them scarred, debilitated, or otherwise susceptible to such recruitment.
• They can publicly decry the war effort, vilify the United States, and insist that it is engaging in a “war against Islam.”
• They can be suspected of approving of suicide bombers.
• They can violate their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” by asserting that that foundational document should be subordinated to Shariah.

In the wake of the murders allegedly perpetrated by an individual who was not only allowed to remain in the armed forces and ordered to a theater of combat operations (where he could have done even more harm), but was promoted — giving such behavior a pass is appalling to most Americans. Only the Muslim brotherhood and others indifferent to, if not supportive of, its mission to “destroy Western civilization from within” would find this an acceptable state of affairs.

Unfortunately, it is thanks precisely to the Muslim Brotherhood — doing business as various fronts like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), etc. — that we find ourselves in this fix.

The run-up to the Ft. Hood massacre and the official response in its aftermath demonstrates the extent to which U.S. government civilian and military agencies have allowed themselves to be influenced, penetrated, and suborned.

The problem goes beyond political correctness and an attendant, inadequate oversight of an obviously problematic individual. Neither can it be excused away as an isolated instance of incompetence in the chain of command, the intelligence community and/or law enforcement.

What is at work here is, in the words of Stephen Coughlin, a comprehensive and collective failure of the “professional duty to know” our enemy, what animates him, and the nature of his intentions and his strategy for actualizing them.

Coughlin, another major in the U.S. Army (Reserves), used to warn against this practice as a contractor supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Until, that is, he was purged from the George W. Bush Pentagon by an influential friend of the Muslim Brotherhood in then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England’s office.

As National Review Online’s Andy McCarthy has pointed out, the message to those in and out of uniform could not have been more clear: You will jeopardize your livelihood if you are not adequately “sensitive” — which is to say acquiescent to — Muslim sensibilities. No one with any ambition, or simply with a well-developed sense of self-preservation, wants to risk ending a career by being called a “bigot,” “racist,” or “Islamophobe.”

CAIR, in particular, was in a position powerfully to imprint this message on FBI agents (including, presumably, some who found unobjectionable Hasan’s many interactions with the terrorist-tied imam, Anwar al-Awlaki) in mandatory “sensitivity training” sessions it regularly ran for the Bureau until last year when the latter broke off the relationship. (Incredibly, the FBI now uses another Brotherhood front, ISNA, to desensitize our front line of defense against domestic terrorism.)

We are witnessing in the collective cognitive dissonance over Shariah’s role in the Fort Hood massacre the cumulative result of the Muslim Brotherhood’s success in intimidating not only government officials but journalists and the public at large since shortly after the 9/11 attack.

Corrective action is clearly required. The place to start is by calling such behavior what it is: submission — the literal meaning of the word “Islam” and the unacceptable, anti-constitutional status to which Shariah and its adherents intend to reduce us all.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio.

Originally Posted at Newsmax