The fact was, however, as I have written and said on a number of occasions, America was going in a similar direction, albeit more slowly and with a quite different demographic. While the vast majority of its Muslim citizens appeared to be people who really had come to the US to get a slice of the good life and had signed up to American values, there was a growing element amongst US Muslims which was becoming steadily radicalised. Worse still, the FBI and other counter-terrorism agencies had been influenced by their appeasement-minded British cousins in the security world peddling their wholly false analysis of Islamic terrorism as having nothing to do with religion, encouraging US officials similarly to downplay or passively allow the rise of US radicalisation. (See for example this story about the silence over a Hizb ut Tahrir conference in Chicago.) Now we have seen the horrific outcome – the Fort Hood attack which left 13 people dead and dozens more injured by army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who reportedly screamed the jihadi battle cry ‘Allahu akhbar!’ before he opened fire. There can be no doubt whatever that this was a jihadi attack upon America, not least from the evidence that has now surfaced of Major Hasan’s attitudes for months before his rampage – evidence that the US authorities simply ignored. The Times reported: His name appears above radical internet postings praising Islamic suicide bombers — something that the FBI was alerted to six months ago. He had frequent arguments with soldiers at Fort Hood because of his declarations that fellow Muslims ‘should stand up and fight against the aggressor’, and his vocal opposition to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He even appeared to celebrate the shooting dead of a soldier at an army recruiting centre in Arkansas in June, carried out by a Muslim convert. He said at the time that Muslims should strap on suicide bombs and detonate them in Times Square. These were the extraordinarily provocative statements and actions of the army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan in the months before his deadly shootings at Fort Hood — a massacre that began with him shouting ‘God is Great’ in Arabic. Yet not only did the US authorities ignore these warning signs that its army psychiatrist was an Islamist fanatic – it has been revealed that he was even a member of the Homeland Security panel advising on the presidential transition -- but much of the media reaction to the atrocity on both sides of the Atlantic has demonstrated an astounding state of denial. The BBC tried to close off any possibility that this was a jihadi attack and then appeared to lose interest in the story altogether; while the Guardian maintained that the victims of the atrocity were not the American military but the Muslim community, on the basis of revenge attacks against them of which, thankfully, there has been as yet not one sign. (This is the same Guardian that, week in, week out, runs mendacious or distorted pieces about Israel which contribute to a climate of frenzied hatred of Israel and its Jewish supporters which results in dramatic spikes in the number of attacks on British Jews). See Robin Shepherd’s blog entry for an excellent analysis of this extraordinary coverage. And see Robert Spencer hereand here and C Edmund Wright here for some discussion of Jihadi Denial Syndrome in the US. Now it has been further revealed that Hasan worshipped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a ‘spiritual adviser’ to three of the hijackers who attacked America on 9/11. Nevertheless, people are still suggesting that he just snapped -- possibly under the impact of, wait for it, post-traumatic stress arising from military conflict. In other words, he was not a religious fanatic but was merely deranged. But religious fanatics are deranged. How else to describe the people who cut off the heads of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg and so many others; or who strapped suicide bomb belts onto hundreds of Iranian children to turn them into human bombs against the Iraqis; or who want to murder thousands of their fellow British citizens because the Islamists ‘love death’? Oh I forgot; they are all just resistance fighters against Israeli oppression. One really has to wonder, looking at this reaction to the fanatic psychiatrist whom the US authorities employed to counsel their soldiers, just who really needs the clinical treatment here.
Jihadi Denial Syndrome reaches epidemic proportions
After the 7/7 London transport bombings woke at least some people up to the phenomenon of British ‘sleeper’ Islamic terrorism – and, equally important, to the way this was continuing to be denied by the British establishment – the reaction across the pond was, to say the least, complacent. What on earth had happened to the British lion? Americans asked, scratching their heads in amazement at how a country which had once stood united in determination to fight the enemies of democracy on the beaches was now apparently indifferent to the spread of jihadi fanaticism and support for religiously inspired violence amongst its own citizens. Americans were particularly astounded that Islamists were even being recruited to serve in the British police and other parts of the establishment.
Sunday, 8 November 2009
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