Reaping the Melting Pot Whirlwind

When Nidal Hasan, the Muslim-American Army psychologist, walked into the Ft. Hood Texas Soldier Readiness facility, screamed "Allah Akbar" and began shooting un-armed servicemen, his murderous rampage was a direct result of the "diversity mania" that Western intellectuals have held as their highest value for the better part of 50 years. Hasan found himself caught between two worlds, because modern intellectuals insist, contrary to all experience and reason, that all people are interchangeable, and that culture, religion and race are meaningless constructs with no independent reality of meaning.

As the evidence of Hasan's ties to other radical Muslims, his expressions of support for Muslim terrorists and embrace of the ideal of jihad have come to light, many commentators have voiced truths that any previous generation of Western intellectuals would have accepted as bedrock truth: that people and people are not interchangeable, and that one's race, religion and culture are foundational concepts to most people, who will gladly fight and die for them. Pat Buchanan correctly writes:

America is unraveling. No longer are we one nation and one people. Tens of millions have come and tens of millions are coming whose first loyalty is to the kinfolk and country they left behind, and to the faith they carry in their hearts. And if, in our long war against “Islamofascism,” we are seen as trampling on their nation, faith or kinsmen, they will see us, as Hasan came to see us, as the enemy of their sacred identity.

There is no American Melting Pot anymore. It was discarded by our elites as an instrument of cultural genocide. Now we celebrate America as the most multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural country on earth, the Universal Nation of Ben Wattenberg’s warblings.

And, yet, we are surprised by ethnic espionage in our midst, the cursing of America from mosques in our cities, the news that Somali immigrants are going home to fight our Somali allies, and that illegal aliens march under Mexican flags to demand American citizenship.

Eisenhower’s America was a nation of 160 million with a Euro-Christian core and a culture all its own. We were a people then. And when we have become, in 2050, a stew of 435 millions, of every creed, culture, color and country of Earth, what holds us together then?

But the real evidence of America's unraveling is not to be found in the atrocious actions of Hasan. His conflict in loyalties and the resultant carnage are obvious. The truly frightening fact about Hasan's rampage, which have emerged in recent days, is the extent to which military and intelligence agencies were aware of Hasan's radicalism and did nothing.

Intelligence agencies intercepted communications last year and this year between the military psychiatrist accused of shooting to death 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., and a radical cleric in Yemen known for his incendiary anti-American teachings.

Hasan's communications with radical Muslims was only the latest sign of his increasing radicalism.

Co-workers described an officer with increasingly odd, pro-Islamist behavior. He also carried business cards with the initials "S.O.A.," which may have stood for "Soldier of Allah," ABC News reported.

All of this was known to military authorities and observed by other military officers, yet none acted to remove Hasan from the military (never mind removing him from the country). Why? Because Hasan was a Muslim, and no one wanted to treat him like a suspect because no one wanted to acknowledge that, maybe, just maybe, Hasan would consider himself a Muslim first, and an American second ... or that Islam is so alien to America's Western culture that it is incompatible on some fundamental level. And no one wanted to think that because for decades Western intellectuals - on the left, mostly, but others on the "right" as well - have declared any such thought racist. The threat of that accusation has become so real, so damning, so frightening, that even the US military fears it more than a nuclear strike. Multiculturalist ideology has become so ingrained, and so viciously enforced that Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey openly informed the public that he cares more for the feelings of Muslim Americans than he does for the safety of non-hyphenated Americans.

Casey said focusing on Hasan’s Muslim background could “heighten the backlash” against Muslims in the military, adding that diversity in the military “gives us strength.”

He also warned against reaching conclusions about motives until investigators have fully explored the attack.

Hasan should have been removed from the military the second it was discovered he had links of any kind to other radical Muslims, or was making anti-American statements, or expressing sympathy with Islamic terrorists. Such common sense would have come naturally to a general from any other period of American history - but not, apparently, to General Casey. And the evidence that diversity "gives us strenght" would be what? Diversity in education has sent America's ranking among other nations tumbling and turned most American secondary schools - and increasingly its universities - into intellectual slums. Diversity has sent crime rates soaring in neighborhoods unlucky enough to suffer the condition. And now, it has led directly to the murder of 13 people at Ft. Hood.

Can you image what Generals Washington, Pershing, McArthur, or Grant would have said if confronted with Casey's asinine remarks - or the inane way his command handled the pre-shooting investigation of Hasan? At minimum, Casey should be dismissed. Naturally, he won't be (look who's in the White House); indeed, Casey's strong embrace of multiculturalism will win him support from the PC-loving mandarins of the Potomac.

It is this aspect of the Hasan incident that should send real tremors of fear down the spines of real Americans. The bloodshed at Ft. Hood did not happen because Hasan suffered a crisis of identity - it happened because American has lost its identity. Previous generations knew what it meant to be American; they understood that that identity had a strong, though somewhat elastic, ethnic character, but an inflexible cultural and ideological character. In earlier times, someone making sympathetic noises about America's enemies, dressing as a foreigner in public, and communicating with hostile aliens would have aroused immediate suspicion, and would have been bounced from the service very quickly. Indeed, in previous generations, when multiculturalist dogma didn't act as a blindfold to reasonable men's lying eyes, a Muslim would not have been admitted to the military - or after a major Muslim attack, at least discharged - nor would his family's immigration to the US have been permitted or encouraged.

This is death inducing effect that multiculturalism has on Western culture. By equalizing all other cultures - except for Western culture - and denying differences and incomptabilities, by insisting that the dominant culture has no special place or privelege, by bullying and villifying those who disagree, multiculturalism destroys Western culture from within by stripping it of its identity and mechanisms of self-defense. The people who would have raised a loud cry about Hasan in previous generations have been silenced in our own by the threat of denunciation as racists or xenophobes. It is akin to supressing a body's immune system so that lethal infections cannot of fought once they infect the body. Multiculturalism is the ideological analog of HIV.

Americans are no longer permitted to properly respond to people like Hasan, and thus America is increasingly unable to protect itself against what Hasan and his ilk represent. Samuel P. Huntington warned us about this in his book Who We Are. Huntington understood that as America's ethnic and cultural identify erroded, its ability to defend itself would collapse as well. People and cultures define themselves by who and what they are not, as much as by who and what they are. Americans are no longer permitted to do that. That is why Nidal Hasan was able to murder 13 Americans that terrible day. And it is why there will be more bloodshed to come.