Political Correctness At Fort Hood Poem by gershon hepner

Did being PC maybe lead
to bloodshed at Fort Hood?
Must Americans now bleed
because they’re told they should
believe that Islam is a creed
that stands for peace on earth,
and that it’s very wrong indeed
to claim it has a dearth
of values for which I would plead
since I believe in co-
existence, shunning the shahid
who strikes a mortal blow
at those with whom he’s disagreed?
The world is being wrecked
by those dogmatically unfreed,
politically correct,
and what we need to do is read
what Islamists are saying,
preventing thereby the stampede
of those who prey while praying.

Because we choose not to pay heed
to what our foes now plan
we must to freedom say Godspeed,
here and in Eurostan,
allowing zeal to supersede,
while hiding heads in sand,
the universal rights we cede
in our own native land,
enabling Islamists to breed
hate with our friendly hand.
We don’t fight in Kileen the weed
that helps fanatics fool
all their opponents, and, weak-kneed,
can’t beat them in Kabul.
While jihadism gathers speed,
the Taliban we fight
laugh, Islamists whom we concede
a First Amendment Right.


Inspired by an Op-Ed by Frank Rich in the NYT, November 15,2009 (“The Missing Link from Kileen to Kabul”) :
THE dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right.Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born psychiatrist of Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone. His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration. All these institutions had failed to heed the warning signs raised by Hasan’s behavior and activities because they are blinded by political correctness toward Muslims, too eager to portray criminals as sympathetic victims of social injustice, and too cowardly to call out evil when it strikes 42 innocents in cold blood. The invective aimed at these heinous P.C. pantywaists nearly matched that aimed at Hasan. Joe Lieberman announced hearings to investigate the Army for its dereliction of duty on homeland security. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, vowed to unmask cover-ups in the White House and at the C.I.A. The Weekly Standard blog published a broadside damning the F.B.I. for neglecting the “broader terrorist plot” of which Hasan was only one of the connected dots. Jerome Corsi, the major-domo of the successful Swift-boating of John Kerry, unearthed what he said was proof that Hasan had advised President Obama during the transition. William Bennett excoriated soft military leaders like Gen. George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, who had stood up for diversity and fretted openly about a backlash against Muslim soldiers in his ranks. “Blind diversity” that embraces Islam “equals death, ” wrote Michelle Malkin. “There is a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomenon but part of the mainstream of Islamic life around the world, ” wrote the columnist Jonah Goldberg. Islam is “not a religion, ” declared the irrepressible Pat Robertson, but “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world.”As a snapshot of where a chunk of the country stands right now, these reactions to the Fort Hood bloodbath could not be more definitive. And it’s quite possible that some of what this crowd says is right — not about Islam in general, but about the systemic failure to stop a homicidal maniac like Hasan in particular. Whether he was an actual terrorist or an unfathomable mass murderer merely dabbling in jihadist ideas, the repeated red flags during his Army career illuminate a pattern of lapses in America’s national security. Whether those indicators were ignored because of political correctness, bureaucratic dysfunction, sheer incompetence or some hybrid thereof is still unclear, but, whichever, the system failed….
Perhaps those on the right are correct about Hasan, and he is just one cog in an apocalyptic jihadist plot that has infiltrated our armed forces. If so, then they have an obligation to explain how pouring more troops into Afghanistan would have stopped Hasan from plotting in Killeen. Don’t hold your breath. If we have learned anything concrete so far from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks, for all their certitude, are as utterly confused as the rest of us about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan and to what end.

11/15/09