The XX Factor: What women really think.

Ft. Hood Shooting is Less Jihad Than Part of a Pattern of American School and Workplace Shootings

A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:

Emily and Marjorie, don't you think we ask ourselves different questions about Major Nidal Hasan because he wasn't just a Muslim or jihadist, he was also a U.S. citizen and a member of the armed forces? It's easy to reduce the 9/11 terrorists to pure villains. Because Hasan was truly one of us—born here of an immigrant family, like 20 percent of the population—this feels different.

Both Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Brooks fault the media coverage of the Fort Hood shooting as a willful avoidance of the obvious. Emily agreed with Rabinowitz, saying that we as a nation find it "more comfortable to look away from his religious beliefs for an alternate theory." Brooks claimed that looking beyond Islamic extremism to the other factors affecting Hasan "sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Was Nidal Hasan a Terrorist?

Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal today has a bracing piece about the almost surreal disconnection between what’s increasingly clear about the Ft. Hood killer, Maj. Nidal Hasan, and what officials and some commentators seem unable to acknowledge. As she writes: “It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.” She quotes Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. as saying, “"This terrible event would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty." As Mona Charen points out, the idea of a witch hunt is false and dangerous. Surely the general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the military, we embrace fanatics in our midst. Rooting them out has to be to the benefit of the brave, patriot Muslims who serve. Ralph Peters makes the larger point that, “By protecting the fanatics, we betray the peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and communities” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)