{"id":616,"date":"2012-07-24T22:55:51","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T22:55:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=616"},"modified":"2013-04-10T21:45:32","modified_gmt":"2013-04-10T21:45:32","slug":"aurora-fort-hood-a-tale-of-two-massacres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/aurora-fort-hood-a-tale-of-two-massacres\/","title":{"rendered":"Aurora & Fort Hood: A Tale of Two Massacres"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n

Frontpage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n

The murder victims of James Holmes, who slaughtered 12 and wounded 50 at the\u00a0Dark Knight Rises<\/em>\u00a0movie premier in Aurora Colorado, were still sprawled in the theater when ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross on-air tried to link the killer to the Tea Party \u2014 without even a modicum of vetting the information, as ABC\u2019s apology later admitted. A quick fact-check would have revealed that the Colorado Tea Party James Holmes is a 52-year-old Hispanic, not a 24-year-old white PhD candidate. Indulging another left-wing narrative clich\u00e9, CNN\u2019s Piers Morgan tweeted, \u201cAmerica has got to do something about its gun laws. Now is the time.\u201d New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg chimed in as well with the \u201cgun-control\u201d meme, seemingly oblivious to the lack of evidence that shows strict gun control laws reduce murder-rates. Over at the Huffington Post, Michael Shank fingered America\u2019s \u201chighest income inequality rates in the rich world,\u201d which correlate \u201cstrongly with high rates of social-health problems, from homicide and violent crime to mental illness and drug addiction.\u201d This is a variation of the \u201cpoverty-made-\u2019em-do-it\u201d argument that the current recession, which has seen rates of violent crime go down, not up, refutes.<\/p>\n

Here we see the enduring banality of the progressive mind, mired in discredited psychological, social, and economic theories like a fly in amber. Yet progressives fancy themselves the product of enlightenment and reason, with knowledge about human nature and behavior superior to those Neanderthal conservatives who \u201cget bitter\u201d and \u201ccling to guns or religion,\u201d as Obama said during the 2008 campaign. Those benighted, racist reactionaries are consumed with repression and fear of the \u201cother,\u201d full of resentment over the declining power of their \u201cwhite-skin privilege,\u201d and fiercely resistant to the improving changes engineered by their betters to achieve \u201csocial justice.\u201d Psychotic as they are, it\u2019s no surprise they endorse policies that compensate for their insecurities and ignorance by seeking to exclude the historical victims of oppression. And to the progressive it\u2019s an obvious truth that a few such souls will occasionally explode into the sort of violence perpetrated in Colorado.<\/p>\n

The fact that most of these mass-murderers are loners and lunatics with no political agenda at all hasn\u2019t deterred progressives like Brian Ross from jumping to the same conclusions. It was just last year that their zeal to link the shooter of Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords to the Tea Party blew up in their faces. No matter, the \u201cnarrative,\u201d as they like to call it, of conservative psychosis is too politically useful, too flattering of progressive pretensions to superior intellect. The irony, of course, is that such reflexive assertions are the sign of a mind woefully lacking in critical capacity and hence vulnerable to politically and personally gratifying fairy tales.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the second massacre, equally revealing of progressive addled thinking. Major Nidal Hasan, the jihadist who in 2009 murdered 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood to cries of \u201cAllahu Akbar,\u201d had left a super-highway of evidence about his terrorist inclinations and eagerness to kill for Allah. As the recently released Webster Commission\u00a0investigation<\/a>\u00a0into the FBI\u2019s handling of that evidence shows, several months before his rampage at Fort Hood, the FBI and anti-terrorism task force agents had perused 18 emails Hasan had sent to Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born jihadist consigliore later killed in Yemen. In these emails, Hasan displayed his eagerness for supporting terrorist outfits like Hamas, and inquired about the theological arguments for killing his fellow soldiers and other innocents. \u201cI would assume,\u201d he wrote in one email, \u201cthat a suicide bomber whose aim is to kill enemy soldiers or their helpers but also kill innocents in the process is acceptable.\u201d Other evidence for Hasan\u2019s inclinations was available as well, including a Power Point presentation at Walter Reed hospital that quoted Mohammad\u2019s famous \u201cgreat commission\u201d to his disciples: \u201cI was told to fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah\u201d \u2014 quoted as well by the Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden as justification for their own jihadist murders.<\/p>\n

Despite these dots begging to be connected, nothing was done about Hasan, nor were his superior officers questioned. The FBI conveniently assumed that his queries were part of his \u201cresearch\u201d into the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Delving into his conversations with al-Awlaki was deemed too \u201csensitive.\u201d You can bet if Hasan had been a white supremacist exchanging emails with a neo-Nazi organization about killing people, the FBI wouldn\u2019t have been worried about sensitivity. Hasan was given a pass because he is a Muslim, and the federal government has decided as policy that we must show our \u201crespect\u201d for Islam, that we must promote \u201cdiversity,\u201d that we must eschew \u201cprofiling\u201d of innocent Muslims, and that we must endorse the obvious lie that the jihadist theology justifying terrorist murder is a distorted \u201chighjacking\u201d of what we\u2019re supposed to call the \u201creligion of peace.\u201d That\u2019s why the Department of Defense labeled Hasan\u2019s jihadist murder \u201cworkplace violence,\u201d and why the Webster Commission report speaks of generic \u201cradicalization\u201d rather than the Islamic jihadist ideology Hasan himself endorsed. All of this Orwellian evasion and lying is part of the misguided \u201coutreach\u201d to the Muslim world that for over a decade has not convinced a single jihadist to give up trying to murder us.<\/p>\n

More important, the failure to read the obvious signs of Hasan\u2019s jihadist intentions, and the subsequent air-brushing of his Islamic motivations, both reflect the mind-destroying orthodoxy of another progressive ideological dogma, multiculturalism and its bastard offspring \u201cdiversity.\u201d Multiculturalism is a species of anti-Americanism, a melodrama of white Western wickedness against various innocent victims \u201cof color\u201d oppressed and brutalized by colonialism, imperialism, and racism. These crimes demand reparations from the oppressor, mainly in the form of mandated \u201cdiversity\u201d in private and public institutions, which means a variety of ethnicity and skin-color rather than of minds. After 9\/11, diversity demands intersected with Muslim \u201coutreach\u201d policies to spin a protective cocoon around Hasan\u2019s obvious signs of jihadist intentions.<\/p>\n

That obeisance to diversity, even to the point of endangering our citizens, was on the military\u2019s mind became obvious after the massacre in the repellent statement by top Army officer General George Casey: \u201cOur diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that\u2019s worse.\u201d No, general, our strength is our political principles that lie at the heart of American identity. And getting rid of phony \u201cdiversity\u201d is worse than murdering a pregnant woman, as Hasan did at Fort Hood, only to a moral idiot.<\/p>\n

And so goes the progressive mind: immune to fact, full of ideas young in the 19th century, crippled by incoherent thinking, morally idiotic, and slave to unexamined orthodoxies \u2014 and sometimes deadly for those who pay the price for progressive dogmas.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92012 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The murder victims of James Holmes, who slaughtered 12 and wounded 50 at the\u00a0Dark Knight Rises\u00a0movie premier in Aurora Colorado, were still sprawled in the theater when ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross on-air tried to link the killer to the Tea Party \u2014 without even a modicum of vetting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,86,194],"tags":[72,217,260,35,39,1061,1044,296],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-9W","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5490,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/imminent-danger\/","url_meta":{"origin":616,"position":0},"title":"Imminent Danger","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 20, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Madness and massacre will not result in sound gun laws. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The reaction to the murders in Blacksburg is eliciting the usual liberal nostrums. Typical is the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0editorial that concluded, \u201cWhat is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":519,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/time-for-liberals-and-progressives-to-get-new-labels\/","url_meta":{"origin":616,"position":4},"title":"Time for ‘Liberals’ and ‘Progressives’ to Get New Labels","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine We need to find a new label for the ideology espoused by leftist Democrats. \u201cLiberal\u201d doesn\u2019t accurately describe the party of blinkered intolerance, fanatical certainty, and an eagerness to destroy freedom in order to achieve some dubious utopia. \u201cProgressive\u201d is more historically accurate for ideas\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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