Who is most likely to be the victim of a so-called "religiously motivated hate crime" in the United States—and who is mostly likely to be the perpetrator?
In the wake of the real life religiously motivated hate crime at Ft. Hood, where an Islamist gunman killed 14 and wounded scores more, Barack Obama, General Casey, Even Thomas and Chris Matthews are on the lookout for– the hypothetical threat of right-wing hate crimes against Muslims.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: That is what I'm afraid of with this stuff from the right wing and the columnists I'm reading today: It scares me, because they say, basically, nail everybody. Profile everybody who is from that part of the world and treat them like the enemy.
Please. FBI statistics show that hate crimes against Musims plummeted in the last 8 years. If the main place it happened after 9/11 was in movies, TV shows and in the fevered imaginations of the American Left and lame stream media, it's probably not going to start now. Crimes against Jews are up, however.
So, if we are going to guard against "religiously motivated hate crimes," shouldn't we be looking at a religion in which about 90% of the clerics and world leaders make hateful or inflammatory statements toward Jews? Hmmm, which one would THAT be?
Could it be… I don't know… maybe… the "religion of peace?"
At the Ft. Hood memorial service, President Obama could not bring himself to name the enemy that had perpetrated the massacre that had brought them together on that sunny afternoon; so he could not point to the enemy he could promise to defeat in the victims' names. Quite the opposite:
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy, but this much we do know. No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts.
No, actually, there is one—or at least a significant portion of one. Intelligent people can disagree as to whether radical Islam is the true interpretation of the Koran, or whether more moderate and cosmopolitan voices are. But it is not arguable that militant Islam has more power in the world today, and that "moderate" voices have a hard time scoring textual points in debates against the radicals—not to mention, it is mainly in the once-Christianized West, where those moderates can even engage in such debate free from fear.
Then there is the tin-eared General Casey, perhaps the decade's ultimate political general, who nearly lost the war in Iraq with this McClellen-like dithering, and was rewarded with a promotion to Army Chief of Staff
GENERAL CASEY: "As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."
What's "worse" is an Army Chief of staff who puts "diversity" at a higher premium than the lives of his soldiers. But Casey is a good weathervane. He knows exactly what his Commander-in-Chief wants to hear from him—and always has.
Anyone who thinks that General Casey hurt his career with this weekend's nauseating paeans to political correctness hasn't been paying attention to Obama's appointments.
But Evan Thomas really gave the game away with this incredibly stupid statement:
EVAN THOMAS, NEWSWEEK: I cringe that he's a Muslim. I mean, because it just inflames all the fears. I think he's probably just a nut case but, with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going. And it just, these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse.
Who knows what General Casey actually thinks, George W. Bush spent 2 years not being quite sure; but Barack Obama, Evan Thomas and Chris Matthews don't really fear conservative violence—or even bigotry against law-abiding American Muslims.
No, they fear that conservatives will be proven correct in the public mind. They fear the public will be reminded who correctly identified the enemy all along.
There are few Americans who don't know which side of the political argument was most likely to get in the way of a Nidal Hasan, and which side was most likely to enable him. They know which side would have taken seriously the concerns of the other doctors, students and soldiers who expressed reservations about Hasan, and which side would be likely to persecute them for sounding the alarm.
As the evidence mounts daily that Hasan was a hardcore jihadist and that fear of naming the enemy directly lead to the deaths at Fort Hood, liberals genuinely DO fear a backlash.
They fear it at the polls in 2010.