According to a February 5, 2007 statement from the Department of Justice, “Benkahla was convicted of making materially false statements both in his grand jury appearances in 2004, as well as to the FBI in 2004. These false statements included his denial of his involvement with an overseas jihad training camp in 1999, as well as his asserted lack of knowledge about individuals with whom he was in contact.”

If you want to fundraise for a jailed jihadist, Dar Al-Hijrah is definitely the $40-donation-for-a-halal-chicken-dinner venue of choice.  Dar Al-Hijrah’s  jihadist credentials are impeccable:

Dar Al-Hijra is the mosque where Anwar al-Awlaki was Imam  between January 2001 and April 2002.  Al-Awlaki (bio here and here) was the senior al-Qaeda recruiter and motivator for various terrorists, including three 9/11 hijackers, the accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the Christmas Day 2009 attempt to blow up  Northwest Airlines Flight 253.  Al-Awlaki may still be alive in Yemen, and after some concerns about his civil rights, reportedly the Obama administration now has him targeted as a terrorist.

And who can forget that earlier Dar Al-Hijra Imam from 1995-1999, Mohammed Al-Hanooti,  named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  In 1999, when he was still Imam at Dar Al-Hijra, he testified in support of Ihab M. Ali, who had refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the 1998 United States embassy bombings.   Al-Hanooti told the federal judge that Islamic law “gives him [Ihab M. Ali] the right to abstain from giving testimony in case it hurts him or it hurts any other Muslim.”

Or the Dar Al-Hijra Islamic Studies teacher – and Dar Al Hijra Islamic Camp Counselor -  Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, convicted in 2005 of providing material support to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, and conspiracy to assassinate President Bush, now serving a life sentence.  Abu Ali was also valedictorian of his class at the Saudi Islamic Academy, the Saudi Embassy-backed 900-student school in the Washington, DC suburbs, that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly urged the US State Department to shut down on the grounds that it teaches religious intolerance.

Or the Dar Al-Hijra Imam between August 2003 and May 2005, the memorable Sheikh Mohammed Adam El-Sheikh, formerly a Muslim Brotherhood member and Shariah judge in the Sudan, and one of the founders of both the mosque and the Muslim American Society (MAS), who left the mosque to become the executive director of the Fiqh Council of North America.

That’s the same  Fiqh Council that on February 9, 2010 issued a legal opinion – a fatwa – against the use of full body scanners in airports for Muslims.  He’s also active in bringing Shariah law to America, as the head of the Islamic Judiciary Council of the Shari’ah Scholars’ Association of North America (SSANA).

And we cannot neglect to mention the member of Dar Al-Hijrah’s Executive Committee, Abelhaleem Hasan Abdelraziq Ashqar, convicted in November 2007 of contempt and obstruction of justice for refusal to testify before a grand jury with regard to Hamas, and sentenced to 135 months in prison.   A major Hamas operative since at least 1988,  Ashqar was accused of opening bank accounts and maintaining U.S. records for Hamas.

Nor is Dar Al-Hijrah  just your average, friendly neighborhood mosque.  In fact, their original Constitution required their Board of Directors to  include  leaders of  Muslim Brotherhood front groups who would later be identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial: “the Current Secretary General of Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Current President of Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA), the Current General Manager of North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), and the Current President of Muslim American Society (MAS).”  In 2005, when the current Imam Shaker Elsayed became Imam, he amended the mosque’s constitution to give precedence to the Muslim American Society, and now the mosque Board is run by the “Current President of the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Current MAS DC Area Chapter President, the Executive Director of MAS National Office.”  Elsayed had been Secretary General of the Muslim American Society before becoming Dar Al Hijrah’s imam.  The Muslim American Society was founded in 1993 as the American chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was Imam Shaker Elsayed who sent the email invitation text for the February 13, 2010 fundraiser for Sabri Benkhala:

“Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:22:48 -0700
From: legaladmin@universal-justice.net
Subject: Mark Your Calendar (2/13/10): Dinner

Dear Friends of Justice,

Assalamu Alaikum. The Universal Justice Foundation is pleased to announce that it will be hosting a fundraising dinner to support Br. Sabri Benkahla by contributing to his legal fees. The event will feature Dr. Jamal Badawi from Canada, Imam Rodwaan Saleh from Texas, and Br. Sabri’s attorney John Sheldon, Esq. and will be held at Dar Al Hijrah IslamicCenter’s Main Courtyard. Tickets are only $40 and registration will be at 5:30. The program will begin promptly at 6:00 P.M., and dinner will be served early. Please arrange to purchase tickets as soon as possible because space is limited! You may buy tickets at our website www.universal-justice.net or from Sh. Shaker at Dar Al Hijrah. If neither option is convenient, please email us at legaladmin@universal-justice.net and we will arrange your ticket sale…

May Allah reward you greatly for your efforts in serving justice!

Sincerely,

Shaker Elsayed
Founder and Chairman, UJF

Shaker Elsayed, the current Imam, and founder and Chairman of that “United Justice Foundation” fundraising organization for convicted terrorists,  is a dual citizen of Egypt and the U.S.  He stated in  a sermon at the Dar Al Hijrah in 2005, shortly after becoming Imam there and stacking the Board of Directors with Muslim American Society leaders,  that “Islam forbids you to give allegiance to those who kick you off your homeland, and to those who support those who kick you off your homeland…We do have license to respond with all force necessary to answer our attackers.”  And in the same sermon he stated, “The call to reform Islam is an alien call.”  He is also an outspoken supporter of Hamas and their objectives, including the destruction of Israel.

The Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hassan, attended Dar Al-Hijrah periodically when he lived in the Washington, DC area, up to 2009 when he was transferred to Texas, and his now infamous powerpoint presentation, “The Koranic Worldview as it Related to Muslims in the Military” is closely in line with the 2005 preaching of the current Dar Al-Hijrah Imam, Shaker Elsayed.    See for example slide 11 in that series: “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims”; the examples in slide 13; or the quote that appears to track exactly with Elsayed’s 2005 sermon, on slide 49:  “Fighting to establish an Islamic State, to please God even by force, is condoned by the Islam.”

Dar Al-Hijrah has been staffed by a series of Imams who  radicalize their members – the members don’t “self-radicalize,” as Major Hasan was said to do in the negligent report on the Fort Hood Shooting put out by the Pentagon.  The U.S. intelligence community missed the warning signals from Dar Al-Hijrah’s earlier Imam Anwar al-Awlaki; they should heed the warning signals from the current Imam, Shaker Elsayed.

More on this in days to come – including which invited elected officials could be coming to dinner at Dar Al-Hijrah in April, at their gala annual fundraiser…

We should perhaps discount what was said in May. For, as I have attempted to document in detail here, here, here, here, here, and here, President Obama is a gentleman, and, as such, he is never unintentionally rude. He is, in fact, a master of the insulting gesture, which he seems to reserve for political opponents, such as Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and for political leaders in countries, such as England, France, Germany, Israel, and Poland, which were closely associated with the United States prior to the Age of Obama.

This time, however, Barack Obama may be genuinely tired, and he may be depressed as well. He certainly has warrant. In public, he may claim that he deserves a B+ for his first year in office, but the polling data suggests that he has earned a failing mark, and he has to know better.

As I observed in an earlier post, if Barack Obama harbored any doubts as to whether he was leading his party off a cliff, William Daley — the brains behind the Chicago machine — put these doubts to rest in the op-ed that he published on Christmas Eve in The Washington Post, warning that, if the Democrats did not plot “a more centrist course,” they would “risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.”

Barack Obama has thus far led a charmed life — prep school in Hawaii, Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School, the Illinois State Senate, the U. S. Senate, the Presidency. He did lose a race for a Congressional seat. But, otherwise, to all appearances, he has never even stumbled.

One fact is emblematic. Obama managed to get elected editor of The Harvard Law Review without having to do what all of his predecessors did — which is to write an article of a quality that would allow it to be published in the journal. With the one exception mentioned above, his political races have been easy. Events consistently broke in his favor. He has never really been tested — until now.

And, of course, now he finds himself in over his head.

Obama’s difficulties are of his own making, and they arise from his failure thus far to recognize what it means to be President of the United States.

American presidents put aside personal pique and pay close attention to protocol. They do not bow to queens, kings, and emperors; they do not warmly embrace dictators and thugs; and they do not direct gratuitous insults at America’s allies.

They know that, for a president, the personal is not political and the political is not personal. What happens has little to do with the man and everything to do with the office he holds, and no president can opt out of the responsibilities that go with the office.

A president who ignores the niceties, who stiffs America’s friends and embraces her enemies, who betrays weakness and irresolution with regard to an ongoing war will soon discover that others can be rude as well — that those who sense his weakness will treat him and, more to the point, his country like dirt. This is what the Chinese did when Barack Obama visited Beijing and Copenhagen, and Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have repeatedly done the like.

This is no minor matter — for what begins with calculated rudeness can turn into something far worse, as John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter learned to their regret.

In the domestic sphere, American presidents do not leave the initiative to Congress, and they do not continue the presidential campaign after the election is over — not, that is, if they know what is good for them.

The President of the United States represents the national interest; Congressmen often cater to particular interests. If legislation is left to the latter, principle tends to give way to patronage, and the result can be a profound embarrassment. Like it or not, when he signed the so-called “stimulus” bill, Barack Obama accepted responsibility for the national debt and for the systematic looting embedded in the bill.

Once the looting begins, Congressmen may not be able to help themselves. The current crop needed — Congressmen always need — adult supervision, and Barack Obama offered them none. The same argument applies to the healthcare proposals passed by the House and the Senate, which are, by any system of accounting, a disgrace.

The Obama administration’s handling of terrorism is of a piece with the pattern of irresponsibility evident in its conduct of foreign policy and its management of domestic affairs.

When news came that a Nigerian trained in the Yemen and equipped with an explosive device had very nearly brought down a Northwest Airlines jumbo jet outside Detroit, Janet Napolitano initially thought it appropriate to say that “the system had worked,” and Barack Obama, after remaining ostentatiously silent for three days, dismissed the matter as “allegedly” the work of an “isolated extremist.”

Both backtracked in subsequent statements, to be sure. But it was clear that, at first, neither took the incident seriously.

It was obvious from the start that it was dumb luck and nothing else that saved the passengers on that flight, that no “isolated extremist” could have done what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to do, and that the elaborate security procedures put in place after 9/11 had failed ignominiously.

By the time that President Obama first bothered to address the matter, it was already evident that the authorities in the United States had been warned about the man and that he had been trained by a branch of Al Q’aeda in the Yemen; and we now know that the religious leader that Abdulmutallab sought out in the Yemen was the very man with whom Major Nidal Malik Hassan was in communication before he massacred thirteen Americans at Fort Hood.

The event at Fort Hood, which revealed deep flaws in our intelligence apparatus, should have been a wake-up call. What Major Hassan did and what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to do are not crimes in the ordinary sense of the word. They are acts of asymmetric war, intimately linked with one another, and, if we are to reduce the likelihood of things like this happening again, they need to be treated as such.

Even left-liberals are beginning to figure out that something serious is amiss. The latest of these is, of all people, Maureen Dowd — who, on Tuesday, in a column in The New York Times aptly entitled “As the Nation’s Pulse Races, Obama Cannot Seem to Find His,” posed the following question:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

In her column, Dowd went on to compare Obama with Star Trek’s Spock, noting his propensity to oscillate between inspiration and listlessness, and observing just how “chilly” he appeared in “his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253, issuing bulletins through his press secretary and hitting the links.” What bothered her most, however, was that the President of the United States did not even “seem concerned.”

When Obama ran for the Democratic nomination, his opponents — Joe Biden among them — warned that he was not ready. When his party nominated him, Republicans made the same point, but to no avail.

Now, if I am correct in my interpretation of the character of his exhaustion, even Obama appears to realize that he may not be up to the job. It seems not even to have crossed his mind when he ran for the office and assumed it that with the office would come responsibilities of a sort that had never previously encountered and that he had no particular desire to shoulder.

Now he is stuck with those responsibilities, and we are — at least, for the time being — stuck with him. Let’s hope that he returns from Hawaii rested, resolute, and intent on carrying out in a responsible fashion the duties associated with his office — for this would require of him a radical change of course.

Someone should give President Obama sign for his desk in the Oval Office. It should read, “The buck stops here.”

Following on the heels of their macabre Afghan war protest at a White House Halloween party that targeted children of military families for psychological abuse, leftist Obama ally Code Pink issued a statement justifying the terrorist attack at Fort Hood as opposition to the war from officers and put out a Veterans Day appeal seeking to raise money off the Fort Hood terrorist attack.

Signed by top Obama funder Jodie Evans, the appeal was published at Code Pink’s website on Veterans Day and sent out the same day to the group’s e-mail list. The terrorist attack at Fort Hood is cited three times in the fundraising letter.

As appalling as cashing in on the mass murder of 14 innocents is, Code Pink tops that by invoking sympathy for the alleged terrorist as a reason to give money to Code Pink–even putting his act of terrorism on the same moral plane as the recent protest resignation of a former officer who left his diplomatic post in Afghanistan over Obama’s war policy:

“This Veteran’s Day, you can support Under the Hood and the soldiers who walk through their doors with a cash or in-kind donation…

“Click here to see how else you can support Under the Hood (in-kind donations accepted too).

“Our soldiers clearly need more care; the last thing they need is to be put into more harm’s way. Even US military officers think so–Matthew Hoh resigned from the Foreign Service in protest of the lack of clear mission and achievable results in Afghanistan, and of course the Ft. Hood shooter was a Major who did not wish to be deployed to Afghanistan.”

Think about that. Code Pink says a mass murder terrorist act against unarmed soldiers is the moral equivalance of a protest resignation.

Code Pink is even more direct in their justification for the terrorist attack allegedly by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan in a statement posted to their website that they encourage opponents of America in Afghanistan to send to President Obama:

The recent shootings at Ft. Hood and the resignation of top Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh demonstrate how even our military officers are opposed to US strategy in Afghanistan.

Code Pink claims the money will be used to fund a campaign operated out of a coffee shop near Fort Hood called Under the Hood that preys on soldiers and their families. However, the donation link goes to Code Pink’s fundraising page (https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/t/4589/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=5533) and not to Under the Hood’s website (http://www.underthehoodcafe.org/donate.html). Note, fundraising links in this story are deliberately not active.

Under the Hood was opened earlier this year in Killeen, about a mile from Fort Hood, as a joint effort of the terrorist support groups Code Pink and Iraq Veterans Against the War (both groups participated in the World Tribunal on Iraq which openly supported the terrorists in Iraq.) The cafe is run by the wife and step-mother of servicemen, Cynthia Thomas, whom Code Pink took under their wings.

The cafe is a reprise of pro-communist efforts during the Vietnam War to undermine morale on the homefront by exploiting the vulnerabilities of soldiers and their families with subversive cafes opened near military bases across the country.

Reportedly Fort Lewis and Fort Drum have also been targeted with subversive cafes in recent years.

The name of the coffee shop, Under the Hood, is a wordplay on the subversive nature of the effort in Killeen.

In the fundraising letter, Code Pink uses the words of Cynthis Thomas to describe the true aim of Under the Hood–to get soldiers to quit fighting for America:

“For the soldiers who visit regularly, Under the Hood has become a home and we have become family. They tell us about their hardships, they ask for help, they seek information about their rights, and sometimes they find the strength to say NO to war” (empahsis added.)

Under the Hood’s home page includes a testimonial from Spc. Victor Agosto, “Afghanistan War Resister“:“The support I have received from my family at Under the Hood has helped me take the liberating leap from obedient soldier to war resister.

Code Pink opens the fundraising appeal with a cynical tug at the heart strings:

“This Veterans Day, our hearts ache for the soldiers and their families affected by the recent shootings at Ft. Hood. Our hearts also ache for the soldiers and their families who continue to be affected by war in Iraq and Afghanistan on a daily basis.”

Over the course of its seven year existence, Code Pink has caused enormous anguish to our soldiers and their families by calling our troops murderers, assassains, baby killers, terrorists and more in protests at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the White House Halloween party and the Berkeley Marine Corps officer recruiting centers as well as in numerous public statements.

Code Pink has a documented history of working with state sponsors of terrorism who wage war on our troops and of supporting terrorist groups that target our troops and our Middle East allies.

When the U.S. liberated Iraq in 2003, Code Pink opened Occupation Watch, an office in Baghdad similar in purpose to Under the Hood in its goal to subvert the war effort by trying to get soldiers to quit fighting for America.

Code Pink’s history of working with America’s terrorist enemies has not prevented President Obama from allying himself with Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans. She was tapped by the nascent Obama presidential campaign to co-host its breakthrough Hollywood fundraiser in February 2007. She was subsequently appointed a bundler for the campaign.

Jodie Evans appeared with Obama at several high dollar events throughout the campaign. She personally donated tens of thousands of dollars to Obama’s presidential campaign and affiliated Democratic party campaign vehicles.

Last month, Obama allowed himself to be filmed and photographed with Jodie Evans at a $30,400 per couple fundraiser in San Francisco as she handed him a propaganda packet about Afghanistan. Evans was wearing Code Pink propaganda attire when she met Obama, a coup that she will surely share with her allies including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez to demonstrate her influence at the highest levels of the United States government.

Blue Star mother Becky Davis, who has three sons in the military–all of whom have seen service in Iraq and Afghanistan–was outraged when she read the appeal from Code Pink seeking to raise funds from the Fort Hood massacre.

Davis founded a group called Military Families Voice of Victory with her husband several years ago. She keeps tabs on subversive groups like Code Pink as part of her efforts.

Davis told Big Government:

“I am appalled and outraged that Code Pink gets a pass from the mainstream media over the damage it does when they fund subversives and actively work to undermine the mission and morale of our troops, which can be deadly to our troops and our fellow Americans.

“Code Pink’s fundraising letter is morally bankrupt and tantamount to grave robbing.

“Code Pink’s justification for the terrorist attack at Fort Hood as opposition to the war in Afghanistan by officers is seditious.

“I hope the government thoroughly investigates Hasan’s connections to domestic groups, regardless of where that might lead.

“As the mother of three servicemen, I wonder why President Obama works with Code Pink, when they so openly work with our nation’s enemies.”

Code Pink has been widely reported as softening their stance on Afghanistan after a recent trip there. Jodie Evans denied that in an interview with Donald Douglas of American Power:

I asked her about Wednesday’s report in the Christian Science Monitor, ” ‘Code Pink’ Rethinks Its Call for Afghanistan Pullout.” Ms. Evans emphatically rejected the thesis of the article. Medea Benjamin was “misquoted,” she told me. Code Pink wants to bring the troops home, now! — there’s been no “rethinking” of the group’s demand for withdrawal of U.S. forces…She said she’d “been on the phone all day” clarifying Code Pink’s position on the war. A troop withdrawal remains the objective, but the U.S. should stay to focus on improving quality of life.

But it doesn’t seem to early for the Imam that headed the Mosque in Virginia that Hasan and several of the 9/11 terrorists once attended. Anwar al-Awlaki, once the Imam of Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Virginia, has released a statement saying that Nidal Hasan “did the right thing” with his criminal rampage at Fort Hood. Anwar al-Awlaki is thought to be in Yemen having left the U.S. shortly after 9/11.

It is, of course, infuriating that our government refuses to see the obvious. In fact, this incident itself proves that even the Army is so afraid of being charged with political incorrectness that it allowed this jihadist Major to roil in his radical jihadism for some time without being opposed by his superiors.

This attitude of refusing to see the forest for the trees is best exemplified by Andrew Bast of Newsweek who thinks he’s got the real reason behind Major Nidal Hasan’s murderously criminal rampage at Fort Hood last Thursday. Could it be that Hasan was steadily radicalized and steeped in hateful Islamofascism? Could it be a jihad mindset that sent Hasan into that military clinic yelling Allahu Akbar as he shot at anyone that got in his way?

Nope. Ridiculously, it was a “military on the brink,” it was the “stress” an uncaring U.S. military is forcing upon its members that was at fault as far as Bast is concerned. This is his obtuse conclusion in Newsweek’s piece headlined, “Is Fort Hood a Harbinger? Nidal Malik Hasan May Be a Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

Ominously, Bast begins with his worry that there could be more members of the military about to follow Hasan’s murderous example. Bast absurdly starts his piece with this: “What if Thursday’s atrocious slaughter at Fort Hood only signals that the worst is yet to come?” And why would it be a sing that “the worst is yet to come,” you might wonder? Why else but that all that “stress” the military is putting everyone under is about to cause the whole combined services to explode?

[Hasan's is a] killing spree that may momentarily remind us of a reality that most Americans can readily forget: soldiers and their families are living, and bending, under a harrowing and unrelenting stress that will not let up any time soon. And the U.S. military could well be reaching a breaking point as the president decides to send more troops into Afghanistan.

Once again we see a member of the Old Media entirely dismissing the role that radical Islam played in Hasan’s crimes. In fact, Bast seems to suffer the fantasy that at any minute hoards of “stressed” soldiers will soon be roaming military bases across the world indiscriminately shooting at their fellows. One wonders if Bast thinks that they will all be yelling Allahu Akbar in their “stress” as Hasan did? Likely he doesn’t because he doesn’t think Islam had any role in this incident.

Saying that it is “hard to draw too many conclusions” about Hasan’s rampage, Bast then incongruously goes on to ascribe his actions to “stress” instead of radical Islam and that this stress is hampering our armed forces.

… it comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers individually that it makes it increasingly difficult for the military as a whole to deploy for wars abroad.

Bast then goes on to ascribe motivations to Base Commander Cone’s actions in the aftermath of the attack that make no logical sense at all.

In an abrupt news conference, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the top commander at Fort Hood, said in response to the shooting that authorities would “increase the security presence” on the military base. On the surface, it seemed like a logical enough plan. But it makes one wonder how much any kind of lockdown will either get at the root causes of soldier stresses or better prepare them for more battle.

General Cone’s lock down of Fort Hood, Mr. Bast, had nothing at all to do with getting “at the root” of stress. It was a security effort meant to get a handle on that particular incident. Why Bast made the illogical jump from a decision made to quell a crisis to the military’s overall efforts to deal with soldier stress is anyone’s guess.

Naturally, radical Islam couldn’t possibly be at fault here Bast obviously thinks. “Hasan’s perspective is unknown,” the Newsweek hack says. Oh? Yelling “Allahu Akbar” during his criminal actions, his past conversations expressing Islamic jihadism, and his radical Islamic Internet postings aren’t any indication of Hasan’s “perspective,” Mr. Bast? Couldn’t the fact that Hasan attended the same radical mosque that the 9/11 hijackers attended serve as even a tiny hint of his “perspective,” Mr. Bast?

Then Bast goes on to compare soldier suicide rates with Hasan’s crimes as if they are comparable.

Listen, no one denies that concern for the mental health of our soldiers is an important issue nor that stress really is rising in the services today. No one will deny that these issues should be carefully investigated and that solutions to these issues are supremely important to our uniformed personnel. No one dismisses the oft times devastating effects of posttraumatic stress disorder on our troops and no one wants to just sweep these problems under the proverbial rug.

But neither “stress” nor any assumptions of posttraumatic stress disorder have any bearing on what this murderous Muslim did at Fort Hood. It is plain that radical Islam served as Hasan’s chief motivation and for the Old Media to wish this fact away is criminally negligent on its part.

Of course, the real reason that Bast grafted this “stress” issue onto Hasan’s criminal actions is clear by his last paragraph. It is obvious that Bast’s chief aim here is to discredit the military and try to force the nation to accept a loss in Afghanistan as his ilk did at the end of the Vietnam Conflict. His only goal is to undermine the troops and lead to the end of a war of which he obviously disapproves.

The U.S. is drawing down troops in Iraq at a quick clip, but Gen. Stanley McChrystal has requested tens of thousands more to fight in Afghanistan. Though President Obama has made no decision about the way forward, some suggest that as many 80,000 more could be sent in as reinforcements. That would put nearly 150,000 American soldiers in country for at least the foreseeable future, pushing a thumb down on an already stressed-out military. Of course, the vast majority of those under that stress, no matter how brutal, will not pick up a gun and shoot indiscriminately, like Hasan did. But the situation is bad, and getting much worse. From there, it isn’t much of a leap to argue that to further tax our military would do as much as anything to guarantee that the homegrown terror on display today could well repeat itself in the future.

Bast’s real message is that it’s all “bad and getting much worse,” that the U.S. military is too “stressed-out” to be effective. It is plan that he thinks we need to end the efforts in Afghanistan and bring all our troops home now. Sadly, Bast is not above illegitimately using this Hasan incident to push his political ends, either. It’s all just another unprincipled effort by a member of the Old Media to push the anti-war meme.

Of course, this just goes to show the wisdom of suspending judgment until all the facts are in.  Alas, this lesson was lost on the media, who from the minute news of the shooting broke managed to get almost every detail of the story wrong. At first they told us that the killer was dead; then that there might have been more than one shooter. Soon we knew the suspect’s name, and learned that he was a Muslim convert. Then we learned that he had been Muslim since birth. Then we were told that he might have cracked as a result of exposure to combat, only he had never seen combat. Or maybe it was a response to racism he had experienced, or because as a devout Muslim he was unhappy about being deployed to Afghanistan. (And yet curiously, such a degree of sympathetic understanding was never extended to the likes of Timothy McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho who also vented their rage by killing strangers.)

Indeed, even Mr. Obama lost his cool, by rushing to the judgment that we were all rushing to judgment, and asking us not to do it. After all Americans do love their pitchforks, don’t they? And when it got out that the suspect was not dead, and that he had shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire, well- it became all the more important not to rush to judgment, and especially not to assume that the massacre had anything to do with terrorism or Islamic extremism.

Tired of listening to all the non-judgmental judgments, on Saturday I visited Fort Hood for myself.

I wanted to listen to the thoughts and fears of all those utterly insignificant individuals we never hear from on TV or in the papers- i.e. the people who actually live there, both on post and in Killeen, the civilian town that exists to serve Fort Hood. But there was more to it than that – I also wanted to gauge the level of rage on the street. You see there’s a mosque just down the road from me in Austin and I had not noticed any pitch forks or flaming torches in the night. But I didn’t want to assume that the apparent absence of angry right wing mobs outside my window meant that there weren’t any out there. That would be rushing to judgment.

***

I arrived in Killeen around noon and spent some time driving up and down the streets surrounding Fort Hood. It was a low income, mixed race area with lots of pawn shops, fast food joints and tattoo parlors, plus multiple military supply stores for soldiers wanting to supplement their kit.

The first local I spoke to was the Reverend Tracy Smith, of the Rivers of Living Waters Ministries in Killeen. Like practically everyone in the town, he was an ‘army brat’, with relatives in the military- in fact, his cousin had been participating in a graduation service when the shooting began at the Soldier Readiness Center next door: ‘My cousin, her family, they got caught up in the middle of it…and when I heard my family members were that close to it, it brought it closer to home. She had just gotten back from Iraq so she’s combat tested. But the family members aren’t, know what I mean?’

On Nidal Hasan, the Reverend Smith had this to say: ‘I heard he was going out to fight members of his own religion, so I imagine that must have been pretty hard.’ At no point however did Smith launch into an attack on Islam. When I asked whether he thought there would be mob-like retaliations against innocent Muslims, he had faith in Americans: ‘I don’t think it will happen, I hope it won’t, but there might be some small incidents involving narrow-minded people.’

Ultimately Smith was optimistic: ‘If we look at the history of America, we have always been able to rise above. An eagle always rises above the storm.’

***

My next stop was ‘America’s Heroes’, a comic book store located a few blocks from the entrance to Fort Hood. The sales clerk told me his clientele was 98% military. It makes sense: we forget how young soldiers are, or that most of them have never lived away from home before. A few of his customers had spoken about the events on base, but mainly about how long they had spent in lockdown. On Friday he had noticed much higher security around town, reminiscent of the days after 9/11, however by Saturday it was almost back to normal.

The 9/11 theme was echoed a few blocks down by Lewis Smeen who ran the Military Depot store. ‘When I heard people had got killed on post, it was like a shock. After 9/11 things were starting to calm down, and now it was like: oh no, here we are again. It wasn’t the empty feeling I felt on 9/11… that was surrealistic, like- was the world ending? But this was like a reminder, that there are still crazies out there.’

Business was bad: Smeen had only seen five soldiers the entire day, down from an average of thirty or forty for a Saturday. As for Nidal Hasan, he wanted to know why so many warning signs had been missed. ‘You have to be fair and even-handed, of course. I don’t think every Muslim is like this guy, but there were warning signs.’

As for a possible backlash against Muslims in the army, Smeen was doubtful: ‘I’ve had Muslim soldiers in my shop; they’re usually with buddies or comrades. Sometimes I’ve heard talk against the war from Black Muslims, but not from Arab-Americans, with the Muslim heritage. There’s whackos of every background in the military so there may be a few incidents, but I don’t think it’s going to get out of hand.’

***

All the pawn shops in town had adopted a strict ‘no comment’ policy on the massacre, no doubt because they sold guns for personal use and did not want to get mixed up in the controversy, even though none of them had sold Hasan the arms he is reported to have used. Quantico Arms and Tactical Supply on Fort Hood Street also had a ‘no comment’, but didn’t object to me hanging around the shop, and it was here that I met two soldiers who had been on post when the shooting occurred.

The first soldier gave his name as ‘Park’. As he had spent six hours on lockdown he had found out the details of the massacre long after the rest of us living outside Fort Hood. He described in detail the boredom and disorientation of the lockdown experience, before getting on to the topic of soldier’s attitudes towards Hasan: ‘People are shocked. Down range shit happens, whatever. But if it’s a fellow soldier doing this to other soldiers, especially stateside- well, you just don’t do that to people.’

For Park it was Hasan’s rank, not his religious beliefs, that was the issue. ‘It’s not going to be easy for the young soldiers. Think about it- for most soldiers it’s their first time away from home, away from state. They’re fresh out of high school. The relationship between a junior soldier and an officer is like a son and a father- or grandfather: you can trust them, look up to them. They’ve got more education, they’ve got more training, but now it’s an officer who went out and shot everybody. You must trust him with your life- and then you get backstabbed. But it’s more than a backstab. It’s like your wife cheating on you… no, it’s more serious than that. You are deployed and you come home and your house is empty, cleaned out, everything gone. But it’s worse than that. Those kinds of things you can move up and move on, but this…?’

The second soldier, James talked about the fearful, nervous atmosphere on post after the attack and echoed Park’s feeling that some kind of scared trust had been broken. In fact, he said, it was precisely this betrayal that had fueled the anger against Hasan.

‘Yesterday there was a great outrage as to why he was still alive. There was a real pitchfork and torch mentality- especially in Killeen, among civilians… the people in the town want to see punishment.’

This had nothing to do with religion however: ‘They dislike him because he’s not an outsider, or deemed as a terrorist- I mean that’s a justified fight. No this is much different- it’s because he wears our uniform, because he’s our “superior”, and then he turns around and shoots you. That’s a betrayal.’

Some soldiers, ‘more than a few’, would now distrust all Arabs, said James. ‘But I can’t speak for them. As for me, I have no issue with Arabs as a people, or Muslims as a religion. If they’re tolerant of me I’m tolerant of them.’

***

A few hours later, I was back in Austin and the media spin was still in over drive. Nidal Hasan was being diagnosed by ‘experts’ and journalists who had never met him, and who had no knowledge of the background to the case. The NYT was in the driver’s seat, successfully resolving every controversial issue before the investigation was complete. A fantastical new condition, second hand PTSD, had been discovered, whereby the poor major, overwhelmed by listening to soldiers discuss traumas he had not experienced, simply snapped and just had to kill lots of his fellow soldiers… and other such bulshit, and on and on, ad nauseam.

It is true that we should not leap to judgment; indeed each day we learn something new about this terrible event. But the truth is that a whole series of judgments have already been made by our elders and betters in the media and in the administration, and a whole narrative has been prepared in which the killer is the victim, while the real enemy to be feared is the unwashed horde drooling and snarling in deepest, darkest America. This is obscene: of course there are bigots out there, and there always will be, but the vast majority of people can distinguish between an extremist whack-job and an honest citizen.

Meanwhile, it’s a hard life in the army. You get shot at, blown up and paid very little for your trouble. When you’re demobbed, you might wind up living in the cheap housing in Killeen, not far from Fort Hood, among the tattoo parlors and Pawn Shops. Making these sacrifices, the least you can expect is that your superior officers don’t shoot you. And so when that rule is violated, the minimum respect we owe the dead is to uncover the truth about what happened to them, whatever it may be- and however uncomfortable it makes us feel.

Obama doesn’t want us to jump to the conclusion that the shootings at Fort Hood were a terrorist attack by an Islamic jihadist, Major Nidal Hasan. Obama would rather we forgot that Nidal Hasan screamed “Allah akbar” before he mowed down scores of patriotic Americans and gave away Qurans with his business card before his act of jihad. Hasan also gave his landlord two week’s notice – showing that he planned this for a long time. He didn’t just snap.

Obama wants us to ignore that Hasan went to a mosque where a jihadist imam preached hatred of America. The same imam was “spiritual adviser” for three of the 9/11 hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001. Obama would rather we didn’t know that when Hasan was asked his nationality, he didn’t identify himself as an American, but as a Palestinian. Obama doesn’t want us to rush to judgment about how Hasan spoke approvingly of the shooting death by an Islamic jihad terrorist of a Little Rock Army recruiter in June. Obama doesn’t us to draw any conclusions from how Hasan reportedly was heard saying, “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square.”

But Obama says, don’t rush to judgment.

The President was not so circumspect when he spoke out about Professor Henry Louis Gates’ arrest by Cambridge, Massachusetts police Sgt. James Crowley. Obama incited hatred on national television, rushing to judgment against a white cop who was just doing his job. Obama tried to incite racial division and wrongly criticized the police during a news conference: “But I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, No. 3 … that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” The incident, Obama said, showed “how race remains a factor in this society.”

A few days later, after an avalanche of criticism, Obama backtracked: “In my choice of words,” he said, “I unfortunately, I think, gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Crowley specifically.” But he did not apologize for his rush to judgment.

Apparently jumping to conclusions is wrong only when it leads to the conclusion that there has been another Islamic terror attack on American soil.

But to come to that conclusion really doesn’t involve any “rush to judgment” at all. What we know about Nidal Hasan makes that abundantly clear. He wrote “Allah” on his door, according to a neighbor, in Arabic. “Allah” on the door. During his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences, he was reprimanded for preaching Islam to his patients and other doctors. He drew attention from law enforcement officials with Internet postings under his name that praised suicide bombing, saying that their intention was to “save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers,” and that “if one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.”

This was not the act of a crazy person. This was not the random act of a nutcase. Hasan committed murder execution style, at close range. He shot 44 to 50 rounds – that’s a lot of ammunition to come out of those two guns in such a short period of time. This was premeditated.

But Obama doesn’t want us to rush to judgment. Maybe that’s because Nidal Hasan was an adviser to the Homeland Security Policy Institute’s presidential transition task force. The task force was not an official White House entity, but it did make policy recommendations.

And why not? Everyone was too scared to be called a bigot for saying Nidal Hasan was dangerous. Or they just assumed he was a “moderate.”

Like Obama, they rushed to judgment.