Bradley Manning

On May 7, 2010 he was found in a cupboard, curled in a fetal position, a knife at his feet after having sliced the words “I WANT” into a vinyl chair. A few hours later, he punched another soldier in the face. Through it all, his security clearance was not revoked. And despite being as obviously gay as a pair of white-leather girl’s ice skates whose glimmering blades are lubed with K-Y Jelly, he was not discharged as the rules would have demanded.

It is unclear whether this was all due to basic military incompetence or an increasingly pervasive phobia about being labeled homophobic. But in the case of Nidal Hasan, the evidence strongly suggests that a fear of being deemed afraid of Islam enabled him to anoint himself a mujahideen and go on a shooting spree.

Hasan was a solitary worm burrowing deep inside a military-industrial apple that refused to stop him for fear of being deemed wormophobic. Despite raising more red flags than a May Day demonstration, he was allowed to operate unimpeded.

There was the PowerPoint demonstration he gave to fellow soldiers that appeared to justify suicide bombings and contained the line “We love death more then [sic] you love life!” There were email exchanges with Anwar Al-Alwaki of which the FBI was fully aware but insufficiently concerned. There were repeated statements to other classmates that gave the impression he felt sharia law superseded the US Constitution. There were public pledges of allegiance to the Koran as he stood in Army uniform. There were classmates who described him as a “ticking time bomb” and a colleague who claimed that no one complained for fear of appearing bigoted. There was his “Allah is Love” bumper sticker and the business cards he handed out that used an acronym to describe himself as a “Soldier of Allah.”

And then there was the shout of “Allahu Akbar!” and an ensuing bloodbath.

Stepping on over a dozen corpses, General George Casey infamously said he feared that “it would be a greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” And despite Hasan’s claim that he went on a rampage to defend the Taliban, the government defined his act as “workplace violence” rather than terrorism.

In its multifariously deluded manifestations, political correctness denies reality and often inverts it. But it is never more dangerous than when it enables physical harm to the masses in the service of preventing emotional harm to the few.