AN AMERICAN, who seems normal but is driven by religious fanaticism, picks up a gun and kills 29 unarmed, innocent people.
This was not U.S. Army Major NidalMalik Hasan, who killed 13. It was Baruch Goldstein, who killed Muslim worshippers in a West Bank mosque in 1994.
I have no trouble calling Goldstein a religious extremist and a Jewish terrorist. He was widely and loudly condemned by almost all American Jews and Israelis.
Why should anyone pause before calling Hasan a religious extremist and an Islamic terrorist? He was apparently animated by religious belief; his business card carried the acronym SOA, for Soldier of Allah.
Not Uncle Sam. Allah.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, America's largest Muslim civil-rights and advocacy group, denounced Hasan's alleged actions, but stopped short of calling him a "terrorist." In a brief interview Thursday, CAIR Executive Director Ibrahim Hooper told me that all the facts are not in.
I had follow-up questions, but Hooper begged off because of a heavy interview schedule.
In an interview Saturday, M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, had no problem declaring Hasan's act "terrorism," which he called a symptom of the underlying cause, "political Islam."
The government has charged Hasan with 13 counts of premeditated murder, which means the government doesn't think he suddenly "snapped."
Jasser, a physician and U.S. Navy veteran who describes himself as a devout Muslim, believes that "Dr. Hasan slid down a slippery slope that took years."
We now hear there were red flares in Hasan's work history going off like bottle rockets, but were not reported, probably for fear of someone being labeled "Islamophobic."
If so, we've got to ditch the idea that American Muslims are such hothouse orchids that they wilt under cold scrutiny. Muslims must understand that if murderous plots are hatched in a mosque - as was the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center - then that mosque needs to be surveilled and worshippers might be persons of interest to law enforcement.
The government would swoop in like a falcon if white supremacists were meeting in a church to draw up attacks on blacks. We can't let legal astigmatism blind us to PWM - Plotting While Muslim.
At the Fort Hood memorial service, President Obama reminded America that this is a "time of war."
