What a surprise — that someone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre playing down Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.
Krauthammer is a really smart guy, and he is right. We should not be afraid to call out criminals for what they are, and whom they say they represent. Whether those are Islamic fundamentalist radicals trying to own the world, Jews committing atrocities against the Palestinians, Yugoslav Catholics committing mass murder and rape in the process of ethnic cleansing against their Muslim neighbors, or our fundamentalist Protestant brothers killing doctors and innocent bystanders by bombing abortion clinics, God is not on their side. And we should not be either.
One may as well say that the Holocaust had nothing to do with anti-semitism. Why does the media bend over backwards to deny that Islamic rage, directed toward “infidels”, was at the bottom of this ?
#1: No such thing as “Yugoslav Catholics”.
azusa (#3),
You’re right. Doug presumably meant Croatian Catholics, although I think (IIRC) that Serbian Orthodox thugs were even worse in regard to ethnic cleanisng. But the main thing is that Doug’s basic point is right on.
More importantly, Charles Krauthammer is spot on. What’s ironic is that his timely column appeared in [b]The Washington Post[/b], which is as bad an example of the liberal political correctness Krauthammer is decrying as any newspaper in the MSM.
The author asks the haunting question, [i]”Have we totally lost our moral bearings?”[/i] To which my first, instinctive response is, “Well, that’s surely a rhetorical question. Of course, we have!” But on further reflection, a more thoughtful reaction might be, [i]Who is the “we” here?[/i]
And if Krauthammer means the dozens of the MSM, who it might be argued are merely catering to what they perceive as what the public wants to read and hear, then two answers to his question seem about equally appropriate. First, OF COURSE the MSM has totally lost its moral bearings. But we all knew that already.
The other answer, perhaps more helpful, would be that the MSM, like the cultural elite as a whole, have switched moral compasses and that’s why they are prone to such colossally dumb things as futilely trying to gloss over the Islamic roots of the motives of the psycho Muslim shrink who deluded himself into thinking that he was serving Allah by murdering American troops and civilians.
So it’s not that they failed to check their moral compass. The deeper and more troubling problem is that they were using the WRONG moral compass to begin with.
I like Krauthammer’s sense of outrage. It WAS outrageous.
David Handy+