Many hit home. In 2003, Hasan Akbar, a Muslim convert, rolled a grenade into the tent of his fellow soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. In June, Abdulhakim Muhammad, another convert, killed one Army recruiter and wounded another in Little Rock. Naveed Haq shot six women at the Seattle Jewish Federation office in 2006.
Federal agents have thwarted planned terror attacks on Fort Dix, N.J., folded up a terror ring in Lackawanna, N.Y., and uncovered plots against the nation's financial centers, the World Bank, the Sears Tower, the New York subway system, the Los Angeles airport, the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, 10 airliners landing in the U.S. (the liquid bomb plot), JFK airport, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Prudential Building in Newark, N.J., among others.
So shall we arrest all the Muslims in America? That's the caricature that is encouraged by the "backlash" peddlers. Obviously not. But what we must do is to discriminate -- that is, to make distinctions based on what kind of Islam Muslims embrace. We have created a climate in which members of the military were afraid to raise questions about the bald and blatant Islamist comments Major Nidal Hasan expressed over many years. He was overhead saying, "maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square." He was caught proselytizing his patients. He argued frequently to colleagues that the U.S. was engaged in a "war against Islam."
Yet no one raised a red flag. Might be interpreted as anti-Muslim bigotry. And so the military took no action against a man who loudly advertised his extremist sympathies. Thirteen Americans paid for that with their lives.
If any good were to come out of the Fort Hood massacre, it would be a new clarity about what we are fighting. Islamism is the enemy. Moderate Muslims are allies in the cause. We should no more shrink from confronting and battling Islamism than we would from any of the "isms" we destroyed in the 20th century.
Muddled thinking and misplaced delicacy have proved deadly.