'63% say political correctness kept military from preventing Ford Hood Massacre'

That’s the result of a national telephone survey by pollster Rasmussen Reports. 63 percent of Americans think political correctness led to the Fort Hood massacre.

I earlier explained in detail how the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan, benefited from an unfair double standard that allowed him to engage in behavior that would not have been tolerated from soldiers from different religious backgrounds, who would have suffered adverse consequences under strict military rules of conduct. Hasan evaded meaningful oversight because of politically-correct “sensitivity” and “diversity” concerns. Ironically, as I noted in the Examiner's print edition, his extremism would not have been tolerated in the armies of moderate, predominantly-Muslim countries like Albania and Turkey, where his pro-terrorist sympathies and on-the-job religious proselytizing would not be welcome.

As Ron Smith noted in the Baltimore Sun,

“The accused mass murderer, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, couldn’t have been more open about his lunacy if he’d taken out billboard ads proclaiming it to passing motorists. The army psychiatrist conducted an hour long PowerPoint presentation . . .that was ostensibly a medical presentation but turned out to be a rant against non-Muslims - infidels, he said, who should be burned in oil and beheaded. That should have set off alarms, but reportedly, none of the doctors in attendance filed a complaint for fear of being seen as ‘discriminatory’ against Muslim soldiers. And they had good reason to be wary. As we know from Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey’s appearance on ‘Sunday Morning,’ a greater tragedy than the carnage inflicted on unarmed soldiers by an officer of their own army would be anything that called into question ‘diversity’ as a priority of the American military.”

Major Shawn Keller made the same point earlier, in a column entitled “An Officer’s Outrage Over Fort Hood.” “There was no shortage of warning signs that Hasan identified more with Islamic Jihadists than he did with the US Army. . .But just like September 11, those agencies and individuals charged with keeping America and Americans safe failed to connect the dots that would have saved lives. Jihadist rhetoric espoused by Hasan was categorically dismissed out of submissiveness to the concepts of tolerance and diversity. . . . the leaders in Hasan’s chain-of-command failed to act . . . out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim and receiving a negative evaluation report.”

As military attorney Thomas Kenniff notes, there is a climate of “obsessive political correctness” right now in the military. Althoug Hasan’s anti-American, pro-terrorist views were common knowledge, “a fear of appearing discriminatory . . . kept officers from filing a formal written complaint,” reports the Associated Press. Moreover, “a key official on a review committee reportedly asked how it might look to terminate a key resident who happened to be a Muslim,” notes NPR. As a result, he escaped any disciplinary action or review of his fitness.

Military leaders remain wedded to the concept of “diversity” at the expense of equal treatment, engaging in racial discrimination at the military academies in the name of “diversity,” including mandating racial preferences in admissions.