By James Neilson

for the Buenos Aires Herald

A week has gone by since Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded about 30 others at Fort Hood, the US Army’s biggest base anywhere, but many distinguished North Americans, from President Barack Obama downwards, still insist they are completely flummoxed by what happened. Was the man driven by “stress”? Did he just “snap”?  Was it because he found it hard to get a wife?  Was he nervous about the possibility that he would be posted to Afghanistan?  Or was it simply yet another case of a man in a gun-mad country letting of steam by slaughtering anyone unlucky enough to come within shooting distance?

From the beginning, such bewilderment struck a decidedly false note. There never was anything at all mysterious about what got into Major Hasan.  As he himself had gone to considerable lengths to make plain, he was, and no doubt still is, a committed jihadi who thinks Amerikka is waging a crusade against Islam and it is therefore the duty of all right-thinking Muslims to defend themselves by killing unbelievers, especially if they happen to be in uniform.

Like others of his kind, Hasan was in contact with people habitually described as “radical clerics” who tell their followers that murdering Jews, Christians, agnostics and tepid Muslims will put you on the fast track to a sexy paradise. He went around praising suicide bombers.  The attack was premeditated: before embarking on it he carefully disposed of some of his worldly goods. And while at it he howled the jihadi war-cry, Allahu Akbar.

Why then, were Obama, Army spokespeople, politicians, media pundits and the rest of them so reluctant to recognize that the US homeland had just suffered its worst terrorist attack since a bunch of Saudis rammed airliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon? One reason is a decent aversion to tarring all members of a variegated religious community with the same brush; another is an escapist refusal to accept that Islamic militancy is perhaps the gravest threat facing Western societies today.  Obama, like his predecessor George W. Bush, clings to the notion that “true” Islam is a “religion of peace” and that people who kill in its name are simply incapable of understanding it.

Unfortunately, history, and what is currently happening in all Muslim countries, in which Christians, Buddhists, Hindus are targets of  systematic persecution, and the many in which Muslim settlers make up a sizeable minority, suggest otherwise. Islam is a warrior creed. It was spread by the sword. The jihadis can quote scripture with the best of them and find plenty in the Koran and the hadith to justify their behaviour. They believe it is their holy duty to make the entire world Islamic by forcing its inhabitants to choose between their own particular version of the one true faith, being what one might call a second-class citizen or “dhimmi”, or having their heads chopped off. All the schools of jurisprudence agree that apostasy must be punished by death.  The “honour killings” of wives and daughters who consort with unbelievers or show too much leg meet with wide-spread approval.

Facing the challenge thus posed is proving to be extremely difficult in democratic countries where the prevailing ethos is based on mutual tolerance, respect for individual rights and multicultural pluralism. Accustomed as North Americans and Europeans are to an easy-going we’re-all-in-this-together approach, they are at a loss as to how to handle people who, like many Christians in previous centuries, believe that they and only they are in possession of the absolute truth and must make everybody else to submit to them by whatever means may be necessary. To make matters worse, throughout the world Westerners are in a self-critical mood and many of them, especially left-wingers, are inclined to agree with the jihadis that, seeing they have been victims of imperialist aggression, they are fully entitled to try and get their own back.

Surprisingly, it would seem that the people running the US Army are as “politically correct” as most academics and social workers. Though they knew all about Major Hasan’s Islamic interpretation of world events and of his willingness, as a psychiatrist, to tell his stressed-out military patients that the US was evil and jihad was good, and that he desperately wanted to get into contact with Al-Qaeda, they did not let such foibles worry them for fear of being accused of favouring the dastardly practice of ethnic or religious profiling. So instead of booting him out and warning the FBI that he was an extremely dangerous character its agents should keep under strict surveillance, they decided to let him get on with his business. That was a terrible mistake.

So what will happen now? The “backlash” against Muslims in the US that they and their sympathizers routinely warn us against has yet to materialize, but sooner of later the security services will have to deprive jihadis of the opportunity to emulate Major Hasan rather than keep on pretending to themselves that there is no connexion between Islam and terrorist violence.  That will mean a certain amount - perhaps a great deal - of discrimination against a religious minority, which will go against the North American grain. The situation would be less unpleasant if all Muslim organizations made it their job to root out potential terrorists in their midst and hand them over to the appropriate authorities, but to judge by their record so far the chances of that happening are remote.