The disease of political correctness

Deadliest virus: Political correctness

By: Gary Bauer and Tom Rose November 17, 2009 05:26 AM EST

‘You see, Pinocchio,” said the Blue Fairy, “a lie keeps growing and growing until it’s as plain as the nose on your face.” Sadly, this simple lesson, once taught only to small children, must be taught again to “grown-ups” who have conditioned our culture, our politicians and even our armed forces to deny and ignore the grave threats we face. But today the lies are called “political correctness,” and the consequences can be death. Far more dangerous than Maj. Nidal Hasan’s heinous act at Fort Hood is our collective refusal to see it for what it is: a terrorist act inspired by radical Islam. Radical Islam is made more dangerous because political correctness has conditioned us not to identify it as the source of terrorism. Like so much else delivered to us by the self-anointed virtuous class, the political correctness that would make us a “fairer” and more “open-minded” society now has us on our knees. We have so successfully shut down our body politic’s immune system that any foreign agent — in this case, radical Islam — is free, even encouraged, to run wild in our defenseless society. Even lost lives don’t slow the virulent PC virus. By turning Hasan into a victim, a “soldier who snapped,” terrorism’s unwitting domestic enablers denied the real danger. Sadly, the Fort Hood terror attack shows that no institution is more severely compromised by the autoimmune shutdown than the U.S. Army itself. Gen. George Casey, chief of staff of the Army, has mouthed the pieties of denial so convincingly and so repeatedly as to expose himself as perhaps being terminally infected. The Army’s culture is now so compromised that soldiers are conditioned to be more fearful of accusations of “Islamophobia” than of radical Islam. When the general’s first public reaction to the terrorist attack was to circle the wagons around “diversity,” can anyone blame them? Ironically, Hasan was fast-tracked through the Army because of his radical beliefs. Authorities knew far more about Hasan before he struck than they currently know about many of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Yet the more open he was about his extremist beliefs, the more rapidly he advanced. It usually takes 10 years to make major in the Army. Hasan made it in six. Since there is no evidence that Hasan was a military genius, what, other than his stridently public embrace of radical Islam, served to distinguish him for such rapid advancement? The real shock of Hasan’s terror attack was that so many seemed shocked it occurred. It was not the first domestic terrorist assault against a U.S. Army installation since Sept. 11, 2001. It was the eighth. What Casey’s utter oblivion makes clear is that the United States Army, at least under his command, cannot be permitted to supervise the coming investigation. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) must not permit his call for an empowered congressional investigation to be pre-empted by any Army request to lead it. Transparency must not be prevented from prevailing over hollow calls for tolerance. If the Fort Hood massacre proved anything, it is that tolerating intolerance ensures the end of tolerance. There is plenty of blame to go around. In apologizing for using the word “crusade” after the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush cast down a big part of our own legitimacy to appease the contrived grievance of the enemies who just attacked us. The Pentagon quickly fell in line, changing the name of the operation against the Taliban when it learned that some Muslims objected to the term Operation Infinite Justice on the grounds that “infinite justice” was something only Allah could deliver. The more numerous and bloody the attacks become, the more we refuse to recognize them for what they are. Paradoxically, we are less capable of recognizing threats now than we were before Sept. 11. And now, the terrorist attack at Fort Hood turned the expression “political correctness will kill us” into a literal, if politically incorrect, truth. We must remember George Orwell’s axiom, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”