Major Nidal Malik Hasan, USA, the (“alleged”) Fort Hood shooter, was on a similar gliding path like the Denmark ax man and the Nigerian student cum improvised plane bomber. For years, it now emerges, Major Hasan's fellow soldiers watched him get more and more agitated and often spurting out extreme Islamic views. Nobody, though, apparently dared mark him as a potential troublemaker, harboring unpredictable and perhaps violent jihadist tendencies.
Although no one in a position of authority would discuss why this major breach of security occurred, despite valid reasons for keeping a closer eye on Hasan, there is little doubt that if he had been subjected to any kind of formal inquiry because of his open, hostile, and undeniably threatening Islamic posture, augmented with contacts with a radical imam who had been investigated by the FBI, there would have been an immediate backlash by the “human rights” fraternity about the “demonization” of a conscientious and defenseless man because of his pious religious beliefs. Who would dare then expose themselves to the political and media frenzy that would have unavoidably followed? The answer now lies in 13 graves and the additional 31 lives of survivors devastated by Hasan's privately acquired “vest-buster” rounds and fired with FN Herstal's FiveSeveN pistol.
It is high time that Western countries stop building a designer PR industry searching for excuses behind violent Islamic behavior that is entirely focused on dealing death and destruction on the infidels. It is high time that we begin recognizing, earnestly and openly, the political aspects of Islam, inherent in such expressions as the Sharia law, and their dangerous incompatibility with the Western values of democracy, plurality, equality before the law, freedom of speech, parliamentary rule, and open debate. It is high time that we begin underscoring the tight intertwining of these political aspects with the fundamental teachings of Islam as a religious creed. And it is high time that we begin to abandon the false dichotomies of “moderate” versus “extreme” Islam, dichotomies that are rejected, ironically, by even the very practitioners of what we, in the West, have termed “moderate,” like Turkish PM Erdogan, who has correctly stated that “Islam is Islam and that's it.”
Europe, as the core of the West, has gone through centuries of bloody religious wars underpinned by fearful oppression, hate, and violence. The least that the West can do right now is to heed the lessons this history so richly and so bloodily delivered. There is no “compromise” with those who have made it their holy duty to destroy our “unholy” societies wrapped in the deception of religious dogma. And we make a fatal mistake in trying to ward off the threat by waving “freedom of religion” banners, when the adversaries count such lofty tactics as among their primary weapons for dealing us their indented deadly blows.