Desperately seeking excuses

Tim Blair enumerates ’em:

Mass-murderer Major Nidal Hasan has thus far been diagnosed as suffering from:

• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Pre-traumatic stress disorder
• Post-traumatic stress disorder by proxy
• Prospective traumatic stress disorder
• Compassion fatigue
And …
• Vicarious trauma

Now Time magazine offers the latest medical opinion, also prior to Hasan offering a single word of explanation himself (“Allahu akbar” evidently doesn’t count).   He’s suffering from:

• Secondary trauma

Seems like every time this comes around, the legacy media and our friendly politicians attempt to drive public opinion by frantically speculating about everything except the the possibility that religious belief might possibly have something to do with what happened.  For the politicians, I believe there’s a lot of psychological displacement, coupled with the usual desire to kick a potential problem further down the road, leaving it to be handled on someone else’s watch.  But the unanimity of the chattering class is something different.  They can’t all be cowards, can they?

As I was contemplating that question, out of the blue came this, from Mark Steyn:

Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaeda reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan...  But the pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline — his entire American identity.

That last sentence struck a chord; it had a very familiar sound.  Who else has let pathology trump their American identity?  What if we take Steyn’s last sentence and recast it, a little:

The pathologies that drive the Communists beat within the “progressive” intellectuals, too, and in the end their statist impulses trump their expensive Western education, their American experience — their entire American identity.

Bingo.  Why did the New York Times sacrifice its journalistic credibility to cover up Joe Stalin’s atrocities?  Why did America’s opinion leaders remain oh-so-incurious about Lee Harvey Oswald’s Communist connections?  Why, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, do so many of the self-proclaimed “freedom loving” line up with the tyrants: from Chairman Mao to Fidel Castro to Pol Pot to Hugo Chavez?  And why the endless favoring of any culture except American culture?

For the sake of the movement.  Progressive intellectualism has functioned as a kind of fifth column since the Wilson administration, forever trying to disguise its usurpations of individual liberty as “equality,” or “charity,” or “fairness.”

And like recognizes like:  The deception that Islam prescribes in its followers’ relations to the infidel, and its Muslim-first alleigance are both echoed in the clandestine working and trans-nationalism of the dedicated Communist.

So no wonder Islam is uncomfortable for the progressives.  If you’re an adherent to, oh, say, revolutionary socialism, isn’t it just possible that you might not want to shine too much light on a movement whose  techniques and outcomes closely resemble yours?  Better to yell, “Hey, look (way) over there!”

Because if it’s discovered that there’s one fifth column out there, well maybe folks might start thinking that there could possibly be another.


Related:

HTs:  Steyn via Daily Pundit; Dr. Sanity via “Nahanni.”
Previously:  The whole world is watching

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:55:38 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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