Islam? Islam? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?

We awake to news that after extraordinary police work, investigators have made an arrest in the attempted car bombing of Times Square in New York.  Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani native-turned-naturalized-U.S.-citizen, was taken into custody late last night. He was naturalized last year, and shortly thereafter, made a trip to Peshawar, Pakistan–a hotbed of Islamic terrorist activity and recruitment.

I have read countless reports about the arrest, in newspapers and websites big and small.  So far, I have not seen a single mention of his faith.  Not a single reference to his being Muslim.  We’re left to deduce that by his Pakistani ethnicity and name.

Political correctness has stripped us of our ability to be brutally honest about the nature of the threat we face.  It’s not from a bunch of maniacal Catholics or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists.  The lethal threat is coming from radical Muslims.  Even after September 11, even after repeated terror attacks and attempts here and abroad, we still cannot be truthful and outspoken about it?  Pathetic.

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[This is the latest segment in an ongoing series about Code Pink and its co-founder Jodie Evans.  Click here to read earlier articles.]

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:

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President Obama has pleaded for the country not to go “jumping to conclusions” about Major Nidal Hasan’s motives for his murder spree at Fort Hood, Texas. Even Army Chief of Staff General Casey has said that it’s “too soon to be drawing any conclusions about what happened or what his motivations were.”

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.”

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Like everybody else, when I first heard about the shootings at Fort Hood I immediately rushed to judgment, assuming that anybody opening fire on soldiers on an army base in Texas expected to die. Thus the shooter was either 1) a soldier who had cracked or 2) a priapic jihadist aroused by the thought of all those virgins in paradise. Reasoning that an armed Islamist would struggle to penetrate Fort Hood’s security, I concluded that the shooter was probably an unfortunate soldier gone berserk. A few hours later however I discovered secret option 3) that the “alleged” shooter Nidal Hasan was both a soldier and a jihadi nutbag- an entirely new hybrid, in other words.

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.

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Last week, right after the Fort Hood shootings by Major Nidal Malik Hasan that killed thirteen people and wounded thirty, the Council on American Islamic Relations showed up on PBS and MSNBC with their three standard talking points, here paraphrased:

1. So sorry about the dead and wounded, but…
2. The media’s real concern should be the possible backlash that could maybe happen sometime against Muslim Americans… and most important…
3. IT IS FORBIDDEN to report or analyze the shooter’s jihadist motivations!

Or as Nihad Awad, Executive Director of CAIR instructed MSNBC’s Chris Matthews:

“I’m really not happy to see that his religion is becoming the subject…even if this guy uttered the words Allahu Akhbar or God is great, so what? It tells me that this is an isolated incident…We need to find out how he thinks and what he did, but I will NEVER come to the conclusion that religion is the motive…”

Media outlets like leftwing MSNBC and PBS give CAIR airtime because of the group’s claim to the title of “America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group.” But that claim rests on a smoke and mirrors illusion of political support from Muslim Americans and the U.S. Congress. That political support for CAIR seems to be diminishing and indeed nearing the vanishing point. In fact, much of their current support appears to derive from foreign sources. As a matter of stated policy, CAIR openly solicits and accepts donations from foreign embassies, foreign organizations and individuals from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and other Middle Eastern states.

However, even that foreign support can’t conceal the reality that CAIR is a rapidly shrinking organization that may be approaching obsolescence. A look at just three printed programs distributed in 2006, 2008 and 2009 to attendees at CAIR’s annual fundraisers, and their most recent publicly available IRS tax documents, shows an unrelenting downward trend in their public support over the last five years. The numbers don’t lie, and they are drawn from CAIR’s own public documents.

So you don’t have to wait for Hollywood’s remake next year of The Incredible Shrinking Man ; a real-life remake is going on in Washington starring the controversial lawfare and lobbying group, The Incredible Shrinking Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Let us count the ways that CAIR is shrinking:

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Barack Hussein Obama has advised us not to rush to judgment about the massacre at Fort Hood. “We don’t know all the answers yet. And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts,” said the President in a statement he delivered from the Rose Garden (while George W. Bush was in Fort Hood).

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.

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An observant Muslim with an apparent history of support for suicide bombing shoots up an American Army base. Think you can guess his motives?

If you said religion or politics, you’re not a member of the conventional media. In the first 24 hours after the shooting, media reports portrayed suspect Nidal Hasan not as an angry Islamic extremist but as a victim, both of post-traumatic stress disorder and more broadly of American foreign policy.

In a piece posted at Truelsant.com, psychologist Todd Essig claims that Hasan was “wounded by war…. before he first pulled a trigger.”  Mental health professionals, he writes, can be victims of “vicarious traumatization,” a disorder that can prove “contagious and deadly.” Keep in mind that Hasan was never deployed to a war zone. Apparently he caught it at the office.

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