Spencer: Purple Heart for military victims of U.S. jihad attacks

In Human Events this morning I call for the redress of an injustice:

The Obama administration’s willful blindness about the jihad threat doesn’t just make for bad policy inimical to the genuine interests of the United States – as is if that weren’t bad enough. It also perpetrates injustices against American heroes who deserved to be honored for their sacrifices for our country.

The Purple Heart, a United States military honor awarded for military merit, is specifically to be given, according to U.S. Army regulations, for “wounds received as a result of hostile action,” including fatal wounds. It can be awarded in peacetime “to military personnel wounded by terrorists or while members of a peacekeeping force.” Yet the 12 U.S. military personnel (plus one civilian) murdered by Islamic jihadist Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5, 2009 have not been awarded the Purple Heart, and neither has Army Private William Long, who was murdered by Islamic jihadist Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad in Little Rock, Arkansas June 1, 2009.

The reason for this is obvious: the Obama administration has not recognized either the Fort Hood or the Little Rock jihad attack as an act of terrorism. Thus the military personnel killed at Fort Hood and Private Long were not “wounded by terrorists”; hence no Purple Heart. Thus they become casualties not only of the global and domestic jihad, but of the politically correct refusal of official Washington to call that jihad what it is, and to recognize its full dimensions.

Of the facts of each case there is no question. Obama has ignored the Little Rock shooting, and, in one of the most egregious whitewashings of jihad in a field thick with competition, termed the Fort Hood shooting “workplace violence.” Any objective examination of either, however, leaves no doubt that Nidal Malik Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad were Islamic terrorists performing a terrorist action in the name of Islam, and thus their victims were precisely “military personnel wounded by terrorists.”

In April 2011, Muhammad, an American convert to Islam, explained that he had killed Long in a “jihad operation.” He was not a soldier fighting against Americans on a battlefield, or even apparently an al-Qaeda operative acting on behalf of a recognized terror organization. He was a Muslim who was acting in Accord with the teachings of his religion as he understood them – that is, as giving him a responsibility before Allah to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. He was acting in imitation of his prophet, who said: “I have been made victorious through terror.” And in his terror operation, he killed Private Long.

The Defense Department has taken no notice of Long’s killing; it doesn’t fit their paradigm of what terrorism is and what jihad is, and so apparently they think it is best ignored. But they could not ignore Fort Hood. In January 2010, the Defense Department released its report Friday on the jihad massacre at Fort Hood, and it is hard to imagine a document more full of denial and deception. The Pentagon seemed intent on ignoring and obfuscating the reasons why Hasan committed his murders.

Hasan had passed out Qur’ans on the morning of the shooting, and shouted “Allahu akbar” as he shot. He had raised alarm among his fellow Army psychiatrists by preaching jihad and hatred from the Qur’an when he was supposed to be giving a lecture about psychiatry. Yet despite these and other indications that Hasan was an Islamic jihadist who believed it part of his religious responsibility as a Muslim to wage war against Infidels, the words “jihad,” “Muslim,” “Islam” and even “Islamist” never appear in the Defense Department’s 86-page mélange of droning bureaucratese.

The irony was thick when the report recommended that the military improve its ability to identify and monitor “potential threats” — this from a report that steadfastly refused to acknowledge the existence of the Islamic jihad doctrine that motivated Nidal Hasan to murder in the first place.

Political correctness was responsible for the murders of 13 people at Fort Hood and the murder of Private William Long in Little Rock. And if political correctness had not held the political and military establishments in a stranglehold, the victims of these jihads would already have received Purple Hearts. That they have not received this honor is yet another monument to the cowardice and myopia that holds sway at the highest levels in Washington during the Obama administration.