Cynthia Hall tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen.
Hall, as you may recall, was a 51-year-old Fulton County sheriff’s deputy assigned to escort alleged rapist Brian Nichols to court in 2005. Alone. He was a strapping six foot, 200-plus pounds. She stood five feet, maybe around 100 pounds; it would be impolite to ask a woman how much she weighs.
It was also impolite, apparently, to ask whether she could handle her prisoner without help. Oh, and Nichols was unshackled, so jurors wouldn’t jump to conclusions about him.
The story is tragic, if predictable. Nichols overpowered Hall, almost killing her in the process. He shot and killed four more people before he surrendered to police. They were all victims, it seems, of a political correctness that insists we ignore physical differences and pretend deputies such as Hall can handle desperate prisoners such as Nichols.
But we’re good at ignoring unpleasant truths in polite society. Truths such as the fact that Army Maj. Nidal Hasan was anti-American and shouldn’t have been in the military.
Hasan, of course, is the 39-year-old army psychiatrist who allegedly killed 13 people and wounding 42 more at Ft. Hood in Texas last week. How can we know he was anti-American? Because he said so.
“It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims,” Hasan told fellow doctors during a PowerPoint presentation at Walter Reed Medical Center two years ago. He was supposed to be giving a lecture about a medical procedure of his choosing. Instead, he gave a jeremiad about “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.”
Hasan concluded that the “Department of Defense should allow Muslims [sic] Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.” But, apparently blinded by political correctness, nobody at that presentation insisted that Hasan be drummed out of the service. So, he allegedly went ahead and created his own “adverse events.”
We hear a lot of talk about “connecting the dots,” but that’s impossible to do without offending political correctness. For example, imagine that, on Sept. 11, 2001, airport security had stopped and arrested all the men who ended up hijacking the four planes that day. There would have been no tragedy, but there certainly would have been a backlash -- against the security forces.