In Human Events this morning I discuss the latest jihad mass murder plot at Fort Hood:
Yet another jihad mass murder at Fort Hood in Texas was narrowly averted last week, and its perpetrator, a Muslim soldier in the U.S. Army named Naser Abdo, was defiant. Accused of plotting to construct bombs and detonate them in a crowded restaurant full of soldiers from Fort Hood, Abdo admitted his guilt in court last Friday and cried out “Iraq 2006” and “Nidal Hasan Fort Hood 2009–”name-dropping the Islamic jihadist who murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood in November of that year. The most significant aspect of Abdo’s attempt to emulate Hasan’s jihad murders was the one (not surprisingly) most overlooked by the mainstream media: Abdo was a well-known self-described moderate Muslim.
Abdo, a Private First Class, shot to fame in June 2010 when he applied for conscientious objector status, saying that as a Muslim he could not fight against other Muslims in Afghanistan. And indeed, that is forbidden in Islamic law, although obviously that is a law often honored in the breach. Abdo was stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky at that time, and his superiors denied his application for objector status, but in a decision fraught with unexamined implications for Muslims in the U.S. military, the assistant deputy secretary of the Army”s review board quickly overturned that ruling.
The implications of the granting of conscientious objector status to Abdo were enormous. Was the Army saying that a Muslim soldier could not be understood as owing his primary allegiance to the United States, and would be expected to side with America’s enemies if those enemies were Muslim? Such questions were left unexplored of course, and during the controversy, Abdo sounded all the right moderate Muslim notes, saying: “Only when the military and America can disassociate Muslims from terror can we move onto a brighter future of religious collaboration and dialogue that defines America and makes me proud to be an American.”
Once he gained his conscientious objector status, Abdo vowed to dedicate his time to furthering the cause of Islamic moderation and to fighting that omnipresent phantom bogey, “Islamophobia.” He declared: “I want to use my experience to show Muslims how we can lead our lives, and to try and put a good positive spin out there that Islam is a good, peaceful religion. We”re not all terrorists, you know?”
Indeed not, but Abdo was. The contrast between his words in 2010 and his deeds in 2011 couldn’t be starker, and it raises legitimate questions about the intentions of self-proclaimed moderate Muslims in the U.S. Obviously not all of them are secret jihadist sympathizers and would-be terrorists like Abdo, but what are law enforcement and government authorities to think when a leading putatively moderate group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), publicizes a poster exhorting Muslims not to talk to the FBI?