Silence on Islam Kills, from Hassan to Honor Killings

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" Edmund Burke

As the story of Nidal Hassan unfolds, it becomes painfully clear that the Jihadi Shrink who opened fire on US troops at Fort Hood did everything but spray paint, "I Am Going To Kill You All" on the wall, before he actually carried out his attack. Not only did Hassan put a Jihadist abbreviation on his business cards, he delivered repeated lectures justifying Jihad, accused the soldiers he was supposed to treat of War Crimes and was already being investigated for contacts with Al Queda and for defending suicide bombing online.

At a time when snow globes are banned at airports and detectors are positioned in every Federal building, in the heart of the United States Army, a Jihadist like Nidal Hassan could openly and freely express his sympathies and affinity for terrorism. But the thing that Nidal Hassan had going for him, that the snow globes and baby bottles filled with breast milk didn't, is that Hassan was a Muslim, and ever since 9/11, Americans have been repeatedly warned against criticizing Islam. Told over and over again that Islam is the Religion of Peace, and that just because all our foreign terrorists happen to be Muslims acting in the name of Islam does not actually matter. Just as all those Japanese planes flying toward Pearl Harbor and the German factories producing tanks meant nothing in the 1930's.

Hassan's superiors were well aware of what he was, but none of them wanted to risk a charge of Islamophobia. And so they remained silent and soldiers died. That is not a chant you will hear from anti-war activists at the gates of the White House, but that is exactly what happened. And Hassan's case is far from unique. There is no telling how many terrorists have flown under the radar because officials were afraid to be accused of profiling or charged with racism. We may never know what reports were never paid attention to because it has become more acceptable to lose American lives, than detain a Muslim.

In the face of Islamic terror, there are endless desks staffed by good men who do nothing and say nothing. Because they have been told that it is more important to be silent, than to take action, when it comes to the Islamic Jihad against all non-Muslims. It is more important to search everyone, than to profile Muslim terrorists. It is better to have lax security, than to have good security that may make some of our friends from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan feel upset. That is how we did it before 9/11. And that is how we are doing it today, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets his lawyers and the media does the hard work of manufacturing Nidal Hassan's PTSD by Proxy defense for him out of thin air, and the radical Imams whom Nidal Hassan came into contact with are whitewashed with the usual thin paste of the Religion of Peace.

But silence on Islam kills. It kills when we remain silent about the Nidal Hassans in our midst. It kills when people look away as honor killings among Muslim families continues to grow. It kills as Muslim gangs like the Muslim Boys in the UK form and it kills as Muslim riots claim the lives of innocent people, as they repeatedly do in Europe. But when it comes to Muslims, there is a code of silence that falls over even the most committed officials. A directive that warns them to look away, to make excuses and to blame anything and everything but Islam. To deny the truth and cover up the crime.

While Hassan is one example of the cost of silence, honor killings are another. The willingness of American and European social workers to ignore abuse in Muslim families as "part of their culture" or worse yet to recruit Muslim police officers who often take the victim right back to the abuser, is part of the same Culture of Silence on Islam.

As Nidal Hassan spun his web of hate right in the faces of the men and women who were supposed to stop his kind, Honor Killings develop right in front of the faces of those who are supposed to prevent them. And both Hassan and Honor Killings share a common premise, the belief by Muslims that in the absence of Sharia, or Islamic Law, they have the right to apply Sharia and take the law into their own hands.

While it is easy to try and dismiss Islamic crimes as emotional or disturbed. To assume that a man who opens fire on soldiers or a father who kills his own daughter is crazy, that is an American interpretation of events. One that treats behavior deviating from social conventions as demonstrating psychological or emotional instability. But that presumption ignores the fact that while their behavior may deviate from American social conventions, they accord with the social conventions of many Muslim nations.

Nidal Hassan's behavior might seem deranged to Americans, but is considered normal and praiseworthy back in the mosques of Gaza or the West Bank. While to his classmates, Hassan might have seemed deranged, he was in fact a perfectly normal Palestinian Arab Muslim. The problem was that he happened to be a Palestinian Arab Muslim living and working among Americans. Yet liberals who routinely boil everything down to cultural differences can't seem to grasp that the difference between homicidal mania and religious martyrdom is in this case a religious and cultural difference as well.

Nidal Hassan did not just snap one day. Nor did he act out of anger. Instead he studied the issue. He read the Koran many times. He even tried to distinguish which soldiers were specifically guilty of death and should be killed. Hassan is a mass murderer, but he is an Islamic mass murderer, following codes similar to those used by Al Queda, Hamas and the Taliban. The codes spun off from the same Islamist teachings that have helped create generations of willing suicide bombers and willing terrorists.

The actions of Jordanian, Iraqi and Pakistani men who murder their daughters or sisters may be abnormal by Western standards, but are behaving in a way that is considered acceptable and even praiseworthy in their own cultures, where a family's honor is tied to the chastity of its women, and where individual rights are subsumed within the family and the tribe. Their behavior is wrong by objective human standards, but approved of by their culture and beliefs. And it is unrealistic to imagine that immigration is the same thing as moral transformation.

Liberals who condemn such talk as bigoted, are ignoring the fact that it is about ideology, not about race. Last week the London Times carried an interview with a British former altar boy who had gone to fight with the Taliban and was eager to kill fellow British troops. Adam Gadahn, the Al Queda spokesman, is a grandson of a member of the Board of Directors of the ADL and an editor for The Chronicle Christian. Jose Padilla started out as a member of a Latin street gang. The only thing they had in common was not race, but ideology. The ideology of Islam.

Muslims may be from any race or ethnicity, but what they have in common is a religion of death that is dedicated to imposing Islam by stealth, by deceit and by force across the world. That same ideology has infused the culture of the Muslim world, its music, its heroes, its literature and its politics. A Muslim immigrant to the West carries it along with him, and if he does not, he is likely to become a member of a Wahhabi Mosque that does.

To ignore this and to remain silent about it, is to allow for the triumph of evil. There is no telling how many men and women remained silent as Nidal Hassan moved his way up through the ranks. There is no telling how many more Nidal Hassans there are in the military, in our schools and neighborhoods and all around the country. And the curtain of silence that surrounds them gives them ample room to plot and finally to act.

Silence on Islam kills. It kills because it turns every Muslim atrocity into a surprise attack that is quickly stifled, because Islam is the Cult of Death whose name we dare not speak. And as long as we dare not speak it, evil will triumph.