Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of nine books on Islam and Jihad, a weekly columnist for Human Events and Frontpagemag.com, and has led numerous seminars for the U.S. military and intelligence communities. He is the author of the new book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran.
FP: Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
What do we now know about the Fort Hood shooting and what conclusions can we make?
Spencer: Jamie, we now know from the testimony of various eyewitnesses that this act was carefully planned Nidal Malik Hasan some time ago told his landlord he would not be renewing the lease on his apartment. He gave away his furniture along with copies of the Qur’an on the morning of the day he committed mass murder. This indicates that he thought he was going to die – in other words, that he was planning a suicide attack. As he began firing, he shouted “Allahu Akbar.”
We also know that he was disciplined for proselytizing for Islam during his stint at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences. Law enforcement officials flagged Internet postings written by a man named “Nidal Hasan” and he was praising suicide attacks, but they couldn’t be sure that he was the man who had written them. Still, it was in character: one of his colleagues recalled that he had said that Muslims must rise up against the U.S. military, and had spoken approvingly of Sgt. Hasan Akbar, a Muslim soldier in the U.S. military who lobbed a grenade at American troops, killing two, several years ago.
And we know that during a lecture he was supposed to be giving on a medical topic, he instead preached Islam, warning the assembled unbelievers of hellfire in such lurid Koranic terms that some left the hall wondering if he might end up shooting someone someday.
FP: Why does the media and liberal-Left so reflexively deny and ignore these conclusions?
Spencer: They reflexively deny and ignore these conclusions because they are completely sold out to the idea that Muslims, as non-white, non-Christian, non-Westerners, cannot possibly be anything but victims. (The facts that there are white Muslims, and that the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism are not racial issues, but constitute an ideological and societal challenge, are completely lost on them. Likewise the non-white victims of the jihad matter nothing to them.) We can see from the avalanche of “backlash” stories in the mainstream media – even in the absence of any actual backlash – that it is simply impossible for these people to conceive of a paradigm in which Muslims can perpetrate any kind of evil at all. In the lenses through which they view the world, only white Judeo-Christian Westerners can do anything wrong.
FP: What does this massacre, and the media response, indicate about what is coming down the line for our country?
Spencer: The more we remain in denial about how these things happen, and from what wellsprings they come, the more we will see of attacks like this. Why? Because nothing is being done to prevent them. Instead of the endless stories about backlash that we are seeing, we should be seeing stories about authorities calling the American Muslim community to account. We should be seeing stories about authorities demanding transparent, inspectable programs in American mosques and Islamic schools, teaching against the Islamic doctrines that inspired Nidal Hasan. This is not a religious freedom issue – these are political doctrines with a lethal edge, as Nidal Hasan illustrated. It is an entirely Constitutional matter of self-protection to move to restrict it.
But that won’t happen. Political correctness has the media and government in a stranglehold. That will only ensure that nothing will be done to address this problem at its root, and we will see many more Nidal Hasans.
FP: Robert Spencer, thank you for joining us.
*
[To get the whole story on why the liberal media and the Left deny the true nature of Islamic jihad, read Jamie Glazov’s new book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.]
No comments:
Post a Comment