THE SULTAN’S WEEKEND ROUNDUP…
Friday Afternoon Roundup – The Hassan Show and Political Correctness Kills
In the weeks, months and years leading up his Fort Hood Massacre, Nidal Hassan did everything possible to let his superiors know that one day he was going to kill a whole bunch of Americans in the name of Allah.
He posted praises for suicide bombers on the internet. He gave lectures in military facilities calling the War on Terror, a war against Muslims. He even put Soldier of Allah on his business card.
It’s not clear what if anything else Hassan could have done that would have gotten him away from his position as a security risk. It appears that his superiors were willing to overlook anything and everything he was doing in the name of political correctness.
Nidal Hassan is the final and ultimate test case proving that political correctness does kill. For all the complaints about profiling Muslims, not only was Hassan not profiled, he was anti-profiled with openly hostile behavior toward America and signs of Islamic fanaticism getting ignored in the name of accommodating Muslims in the military.
As a result the injured soldiers Hassan saw were put at risk. And finally when Nidal Hassan went on his killing spree, he engaged in a form of behavior that seemingly could no longer be covered up. Except it was and it is.
From initially pushing Hassan’s case as being some sort of mystical variant of PTSD that can occur before the trauma happens or can be passed on from people who actually have PTSD through the ether, to the latest reports that treat Hassan as the victim– the politically correct cover up of Nidal Hassan continues.
While it was a criminal act to cover up Hassan’s behavior before the attacks, continuing to cover for him after the attacks ranges somewhere in the equator between madness and treason.
Hassan who became death incarnate in accordance with the teachings of Jihad is also a symptom of the politically correct madness of a liberal approach toward Islam that allowed him to kill in the first place.
And still the cover up continues. And that means throwing in loads of distractions of course. Such as Joe Klein ranting about Jewish extremists after a Palestinian Arab gunman murdered US troops in the name of Allah, while condemning any talk of Nidal Hasan’s Islamic beliefs as Islamophobia.
Joe Klein, who has lately lost whatever remained of his reason, penned a Time Magazine rant calling Martin Peretz (who is himself a liberal and had endorsed Obama) a Jewish extremist and going off on Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir.
There are today several odious attempts by Jewish extremists, like this one by Martin Peretz and this one by La Pasionaria of the Neocons, to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs as opposed to a direct consequence of his insanity.
Joe Klein characterizes a conclusion held by 70 percent of Americans, and the FBI, as “odious“. He characterized a liberal editor as a “Jewish Extremist”. And Klein himself presumes to claim that Hassan was insane, without any actual evidence of that.
There was, for example, the lunatic Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire on Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994, killing 24 and wounding more than 100. There was also the lunatic Jewish settler who assassinated Yitzak Rabin. I can’t remember many Jews calling these effusions of violence as a natural consequence of devout Judaism. They were acts of psychopathy, as was Hasan’s bloodbath.
Klein here pens a paragraph with so many errors that it’s hard to parse them all.
Let’s begin with the fact that Klein has to reach back to 1994 to find his example of “Jewish extremism.” Furthermore neither Goldstein or Amir were ever found to be insane or mentally incompetent. That is Klein’s own bizarre insertion. Finally Israeli leftists have been making the argument that these are natural consenquences of devout Judaism. This makes Klein wrong on every single claim he mentions in this paragraph.
If Time Magazine had any standards, it would have shown Klein the door for this alone.
Do extremely religious people tend to be more psychologically damaged than less religious people? I doubt it, but it’s not a bad question: Do any readers have access to polling or academic studies about the incidence of violent insanity among the devout?
Klein cowardly suggests that religious people are mentally ill, while backing off on this assertion enough to put it out there.
In the meantime, we should identify the notion that Hasan’s act was somehow a consequence of his religious orthodoxy for what it is: anti-Islamic bigotry.
With this conclusion, Joe Klein now makes the assertion that any claim that murders are carried out due to Islamic religious beliefs… is itself Islamophobia.
That kind of view has been the underground motivator behind much of political correctness, but I had not yet seen any liberal willing to come out and state it so openly.
But this is exactly where we are headed. The more political correctness seeps into the joints and nerves of our culture, the more we become unable to tell fact from fiction and truth from lies.
At the New Ledger, Benjamin Kerstein takes Joe Klein apart in a piece titled Is Joe Klein Nuts
As noted, Klein’s rampaging orgy of stupidity and inaccuracy can only be accounted for by one of two things: ignorance or lying. It is certainly possible that, like many liberals, Klein simply cannot bear to face the possibility that the world may not conform to his ideological preferences, and may consider lying to be a small price to pay for reassuring both himself and his readers that there is no elephant in the living room. The fact that justice, truth, and journalistic integrity will have to suffer as a result is, naturally, of little concern in such a desperate situation.
One is inclined, however, to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt, and conclude that he suffers from another common liberal affliction: the need to engage in moralistic exhortations on subjects about which he knows absolutely nothing. Throw in a heady dose of wishful thinking, and even the most pedigreed establishment mind would be reduced by this to the kind of slathering, bug-eyed hysteria to which Klein appears unfortunately prone.
Indeed, this might well have qualified as an exonerating circumstance were it not for Klein’s apparently all-encompassing need to use his ignorant pseudo-moralism to slander, defame, and demonize other people. Whether this is the origin of his shocking ignorance or a product of it is not really relevant. One expects nationally published columnists, even at Time, to be slightly more mature than a five-year-old child dropping f-bombs to shock his parents. Unfortunately, Klein appears to have carved out a tidy living for himself throwing illiterate temper tantrums; so we will likely have to wait for him to grow up in order to present him with his award. I fear that the wait is likely to be a long one.
Indeed. But Klein’s tantrums have been winning public attention for his showdown with The New Republic’s James Kirchik.
During a hallway confrontation after the panel was over, according to Kampeas, Klein called Kirchick a “dishonest prick.”
Kampeas said that during the discussion, Kirchick repeatedly accused Klein, of having called neocons traitors. In response, said Kampeas, Klein asked the audience: “Can you believe the shit that he’s saying?” Klein later told the Post he’s never used the word traitor in regard to neocons. “I’ve said, at times they put the interests of Israel above the interests of the U.S., ” he said.
For his part, Klein, 62, kept making an issue of Kirchick’s age, said Kampeas. “I’m glad that you’re a college graduate, but maybe you should learn how to report,”
This is ironic because it’s clear that Klein himself needs to learn how to report.
But while Joe Klein is incapable of being a reporter, he has now dedicated himself to saying crazy things in print and on television.
Moving on in the roundup,
Obama has now created more fake jobs than any American leader, but probably not as many as Soviet leaders have in the past. The task that now awaits him is to create an equal number of fake Americans to give with those fake jobs. Finally solving the unemployment problem.
In Iran meanwhile, a Neda scholarship in Oxford produces the usual chants of “Death to Britain”
But Harvard isn’t going that route. Instead they let Elliot Spitzer give an ethics lecture.
The Elder of Ziyon uses the Nidal Hasan case to note the uniqueness of Palestinians in international law
The Guardian says that accused Fort Hood murderer Nidal Hassan was “the son of Palestinians from a village near Jerusalem.”
The New York Times says, “His mother’s obituary, in The Roanoke Times in 2001, said she was born in Palestine in 1952.”
This got me to wondering about a contradiction in the standard pro-Palestinian Arab narrative that the world has swallowed whole.
We all “know” that Israel is considered the legal occupier of the West Bank. It was declared as such by the UN and the ICJ, among others.
The definition of occupation, however, is straightforward:
“Military occupation occurs when a belligerent state invades the territory of another state with the intention of holding the territory at least temporarily.”
The original definition from the Hague Conventions of 1907 states:
Military authority over the territory of the hostile state
Art. 42. Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.
The question that remains murky is, what is the state that Israel is occupying? It cannot be Jordan, because Jordan relinquished control in 1988, and the international community never recognized Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank. It seems clear, from the aforementioned sources, that this “state” is “Palestine.”
In other words, according to the UN and the ICJ, there is a legal entity called “Palestine” and it has existed since at least 1967, probably since 1948. This is remarkable in itself that international law is implicitly recognizing a state that was never declared or recognized. As a matter of fact, it may be against
international law to prematurely recognize a state (note 26.)
To those interested in the legal Palestine paradox, the entire thing is well worth reading
Americans living in Israel are up in arms over ObamaCare as well
The organization representing North Americans in Israel has called on its members to fight a U.S. health care bill that would require U.S. citizens living abroad to pay $750 annually for insurance they may not be able to use.
The Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) informed its members Tuesday that the controversial bill, which the Senate proposed as part of President Barack Obama’s massive health care overhaul, contains a $750 per annum excise tax for all U.S. citizens living outside the U.S.
Rasmussen reports that Obama’s approval rating has fallen below 50 percent
And Michelle Obama’s popularity is equally on the decline
Caroline Glick writes on Missing George W. Bush
A couple of days ago I heard the news that George and Laura Bush paid a private visit to the wounded soldiers at Fort Hood. They specifically requested that the base commander not inform the media of their visit. They came. They comforted the wounded soldiers and the Fort Hood community for a couple of hours. And then they left. And they never had their pictures taken saluting the troops or holding their hands.
When I heard the news, I felt this pain that hasn’t gone away. It’s a pain that I have been feeling fairly often since last November.
It hurts to hear about an American President who cares deeply and sincerely about wounded soldiers and soldiers murdered in a terrorist attack and know that he is not the American President. It isn’t so much that I miss Bush personally. I had a lot of criticism about his policies – particularly in his last two years in office after he effectively abdicated his leadership of global affairs to Condoleezza Rice and the permanent bureaucracy in Washington.
But at least you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans. You knew that he valued America’s allies even if he didn’t always do right by them. You knew that his values were American values.
You can’t say any of that about his successor. And it hurts. It hurts that Barack Hussein Obama’s first statement about the massacre at Fort Hood was so emotionally cut off from what happened. It hurts that he thought the most important thing to say about the massacre is that we mustn’t jump to conclusions about the motivations of the terrorist who killed his fellow soldiers despite the fact that he was screaming Allah Akhbar as he shot them. It hurts that Obama and his wife treat soldiers like losers who all suffer from PTSD and that the greatest service he can render them is to provide them with free psychiatric care and send them home from Iraq and Afghanistan without first securing victory.
Maybe I’m over-emotional, but I can’t get Bush’s visit out of my head. Obama will go to Fort Hood today and say something arrogant about himself. And all his fans in the media will extol his eloquence. And maybe he’ll get his picture taken holding out a limp wrist to shake hands with a wounded soldier. Or maybe we’ll see Michelle in a sleeveless dress embracing the wife of one of the slain soldiers.
With everything going on in the world today, it is all but impossible for me to feel safe in a world where the President of the United States is a man who would never think of flying to Ft. Hood to be with wounded soldiers – not even with the entire national press corps in tow. And so I wake up in the middle of the night, with this pain, and I feel like crying when I think of how George and Laura felt so horrible about the massacre that they paid a quiet, private visit to the post to comfort the wounded warriors.
For all that he disappointed me, I miss George W. Bush. I really do.
David Brooks at the NY Times Writes on how the Rush to Therapy ignores the possibility of evil
The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.
It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.
No it isn’t, but then we are no longer a morally serious nation anymore.
In the weeks, months and years leading up his Fort Hood Massacre, Nidal Hassan did everything possible to let his superiors know that one day he was going to kill a whole bunch of Americans in the name of Allah.
He posted praises for suicide bombers on the internet. He gave lectures in military facilities calling the War on Terror, a war against Muslims. He even put Soldier of Allah on his business card.
It’s not clear what if anything else Hassan could have done that would have gotten him away from his position as a security risk. It appears that his superiors were willing to overlook anything and everything he was doing in the name of political correctness.
Nidal Hassan is the final and ultimate test case proving that political correctness does kill. For all the complaints about profiling Muslims, not only was Hassan not profiled, he was anti-profiled with openly hostile behavior toward America and signs of Islamic fanaticism getting ignored in the name of accommodating Muslims in the military.
As a result the injured soldiers Hassan saw were put at risk. And finally when Nidal Hassan went on his killing spree, he engaged in a form of behavior that seemingly could no longer be covered up. Except it was and it is.
From initially pushing Hassan’s case as being some sort of mystical variant of PTSD that can occur before the trauma happens or can be passed on from people who actually have PTSD through the ether, to the latest reports that treat Hassan as the victim– the politically correct cover up of Nidal Hassan continues.
While it was a criminal act to cover up Hassan’s behavior before the attacks, continuing to cover for him after the attacks ranges somewhere in the equator between madness and treason.
Hassan who became death incarnate in accordance with the teachings of Jihad is also a symptom of the politically correct madness of a liberal approach toward Islam that allowed him to kill in the first place.
And still the cover up continues. And that means throwing in loads of distractions of course. Such as Joe Klein ranting about Jewish extremists after a Palestinian Arab gunman murdered US troops in the name of Allah, while condemning any talk of Nidal Hasan’s Islamic beliefs as Islamophobia.
Joe Klein, who has lately lost whatever remained of his reason, penned a Time Magazine rant calling Martin Peretz (who is himself a liberal and had endorsed Obama) a Jewish extremist and going off on Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir.
There are today several odious attempts by Jewish extremists, like this one by Martin Peretz and this one by La Pasionaria of the Neocons, to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs as opposed to a direct consequence of his insanity.
Joe Klein characterizes a conclusion held by 70 percent of Americans, and the FBI, as “odious“. He characterized a liberal editor as a “Jewish Extremist”. And Klein himself presumes to claim that Hassan was insane, without any actual evidence of that.
There was, for example, the lunatic Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire on Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994, killing 24 and wounding more than 100. There was also the lunatic Jewish settler who assassinated Yitzak Rabin. I can’t remember many Jews calling these effusions of violence as a natural consequence of devout Judaism. They were acts of psychopathy, as was Hasan’s bloodbath.
Klein here pens a paragraph with so many errors that it’s hard to parse them all.
Let’s begin with the fact that Klein has to reach back to 1994 to find his example of “Jewish extremism.” Furthermore neither Goldstein or Amir were ever found to be insane or mentally incompetent. That is Klein’s own bizarre insertion. Finally Israeli leftists have been making the argument that these are natural consenquences of devout Judaism. This makes Klein wrong on every single claim he mentions in this paragraph.
If Time Magazine had any standards, it would have shown Klein the door for this alone.
Do extremely religious people tend to be more psychologically damaged than less religious people? I doubt it, but it’s not a bad question: Do any readers have access to polling or academic studies about the incidence of violent insanity among the devout?
Klein cowardly suggests that religious people are mentally ill, while backing off on this assertion enough to put it out there.
In the meantime, we should identify the notion that Hasan’s act was somehow a consequence of his religious orthodoxy for what it is: anti-Islamic bigotry.
With this conclusion, Joe Klein now makes the assertion that any claim that murders are carried out due to Islamic religious beliefs… is itself Islamophobia.
That kind of view has been the underground motivator behind much of political correctness, but I had not yet seen any liberal willing to come out and state it so openly.
But this is exactly where we are headed. The more political correctness seeps into the joints and nerves of our culture, the more we become unable to tell fact from fiction and truth from lies.
At the New Ledger, Benjamin Kerstein takes Joe Klein apart in a piece titled Is Joe Klein Nuts
As noted, Klein’s rampaging orgy of stupidity and inaccuracy can only be accounted for by one of two things: ignorance or lying. It is certainly possible that, like many liberals, Klein simply cannot bear to face the possibility that the world may not conform to his ideological preferences, and may consider lying to be a small price to pay for reassuring both himself and his readers that there is no elephant in the living room. The fact that justice, truth, and journalistic integrity will have to suffer as a result is, naturally, of little concern in such a desperate situation.
One is inclined, however, to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt, and conclude that he suffers from another common liberal affliction: the need to engage in moralistic exhortations on subjects about which he knows absolutely nothing. Throw in a heady dose of wishful thinking, and even the most pedigreed establishment mind would be reduced by this to the kind of slathering, bug-eyed hysteria to which Klein appears unfortunately prone.
Indeed, this might well have qualified as an exonerating circumstance were it not for Klein’s apparently all-encompassing need to use his ignorant pseudo-moralism to slander, defame, and demonize other people. Whether this is the origin of his shocking ignorance or a product of it is not really relevant. One expects nationally published columnists, even at Time, to be slightly more mature than a five-year-old child dropping f-bombs to shock his parents. Unfortunately, Klein appears to have carved out a tidy living for himself throwing illiterate temper tantrums; so we will likely have to wait for him to grow up in order to present him with his award. I fear that the wait is likely to be a long one.
Indeed. But Klein’s tantrums have been winning public attention for his showdown with The New Republic’s James Kirchik.
During a hallway confrontation after the panel was over, according to Kampeas, Klein called Kirchick a “dishonest prick.”
Kampeas said that during the discussion, Kirchick repeatedly accused Klein, of having called neocons traitors. In response, said Kampeas, Klein asked the audience: “Can you believe the shit that he’s saying?” Klein later told the Post he’s never used the word traitor in regard to neocons. “I’ve said, at times they put the interests of Israel above the interests of the U.S., ” he said.
For his part, Klein, 62, kept making an issue of Kirchick’s age, said Kampeas. “I’m glad that you’re a college graduate, but maybe you should learn how to report,”
This is ironic because it’s clear that Klein himself needs to learn how to report.
But while Joe Klein is incapable of being a reporter, he has now dedicated himself to saying crazy things in print and on television.
Moving on in the roundup,
Obama has now created more fake jobs than any American leader, but probably not as many as Soviet leaders have in the past. The task that now awaits him is to create an equal number of fake Americans to give with those fake jobs. Finally solving the unemployment problem.
In Iran meanwhile, a Neda scholarship in Oxford produces the usual chants of “Death to Britain”
But Harvard isn’t going that route. Instead they let Elliot Spitzer give an ethics lecture.
The Elder of Ziyon uses the Nidal Hasan case to note the uniqueness of Palestinians in international law
The Guardian says that accused Fort Hood murderer Nidal Hassan was “the son of Palestinians from a village near Jerusalem.”
The New York Times says, “His mother’s obituary, in The Roanoke Times in 2001, said she was born in Palestine in 1952.”
This got me to wondering about a contradiction in the standard pro-Palestinian Arab narrative that the world has swallowed whole.
We all “know” that Israel is considered the legal occupier of the West Bank. It was declared as such by the UN and the ICJ, among others.
The definition of occupation, however, is straightforward:
“Military occupation occurs when a belligerent state invades the territory of another state with the intention of holding the territory at least temporarily.”
The original definition from the Hague Conventions of 1907 states:
Military authority over the territory of the hostile state
Art. 42. Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.
The question that remains murky is, what is the state that Israel is occupying? It cannot be Jordan, because Jordan relinquished control in 1988, and the international community never recognized Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank. It seems clear, from the aforementioned sources, that this “state” is “Palestine.”
In other words, according to the UN and the ICJ, there is a legal entity called “Palestine” and it has existed since at least 1967, probably since 1948. This is remarkable in itself that international law is implicitly recognizing a state that was never declared or recognized. As a matter of fact, it may be against
international law to prematurely recognize a state (note 26.)
To those interested in the legal Palestine paradox, the entire thing is well worth reading
Americans living in Israel are up in arms over ObamaCare as well
The organization representing North Americans in Israel has called on its members to fight a U.S. health care bill that would require U.S. citizens living abroad to pay $750 annually for insurance they may not be able to use.
The Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) informed its members Tuesday that the controversial bill, which the Senate proposed as part of President Barack Obama’s massive health care overhaul, contains a $750 per annum excise tax for all U.S. citizens living outside the U.S.
Rasmussen reports that Obama’s approval rating has fallen below 50 percent
And Michelle Obama’s popularity is equally on the decline
Caroline Glick writes on Missing George W. Bush
A couple of days ago I heard the news that George and Laura Bush paid a private visit to the wounded soldiers at Fort Hood. They specifically requested that the base commander not inform the media of their visit. They came. They comforted the wounded soldiers and the Fort Hood community for a couple of hours. And then they left. And they never had their pictures taken saluting the troops or holding their hands.
When I heard the news, I felt this pain that hasn’t gone away. It’s a pain that I have been feeling fairly often since last November.
It hurts to hear about an American President who cares deeply and sincerely about wounded soldiers and soldiers murdered in a terrorist attack and know that he is not the American President. It isn’t so much that I miss Bush personally. I had a lot of criticism about his policies – particularly in his last two years in office after he effectively abdicated his leadership of global affairs to Condoleezza Rice and the permanent bureaucracy in Washington.
But at least you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans. You knew that he valued America’s allies even if he didn’t always do right by them. You knew that his values were American values.
You can’t say any of that about his successor. And it hurts. It hurts that Barack Hussein Obama’s first statement about the massacre at Fort Hood was so emotionally cut off from what happened. It hurts that he thought the most important thing to say about the massacre is that we mustn’t jump to conclusions about the motivations of the terrorist who killed his fellow soldiers despite the fact that he was screaming Allah Akhbar as he shot them. It hurts that Obama and his wife treat soldiers like losers who all suffer from PTSD and that the greatest service he can render them is to provide them with free psychiatric care and send them home from Iraq and Afghanistan without first securing victory.
Maybe I’m over-emotional, but I can’t get Bush’s visit out of my head. Obama will go to Fort Hood today and say something arrogant about himself. And all his fans in the media will extol his eloquence. And maybe he’ll get his picture taken holding out a limp wrist to shake hands with a wounded soldier. Or maybe we’ll see Michelle in a sleeveless dress embracing the wife of one of the slain soldiers.
With everything going on in the world today, it is all but impossible for me to feel safe in a world where the President of the United States is a man who would never think of flying to Ft. Hood to be with wounded soldiers – not even with the entire national press corps in tow. And so I wake up in the middle of the night, with this pain, and I feel like crying when I think of how George and Laura felt so horrible about the massacre that they paid a quiet, private visit to the post to comfort the wounded warriors.
For all that he disappointed me, I miss George W. Bush. I really do.
David Brooks at the NY Times Writes on how the Rush to Therapy ignores the possibility of evil
The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.
It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.
No it isn’t, but then we are no longer a morally serious nation anymore.
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