America's enemy...like it or not

Why do we genuflect to Islam?  When folks blow up abortion clinics or riddle doctors with bullets who perform such heinous procedures, the news media's immediate focus is upon whether his religion had anything to do with it, and if there was a hint of "Jesus Christ" anywhere in his motivations, that becomes the lead.  If the motivation behind a perpetrator of evil has a hint of Islam in it, that fact is ignored, buffered, or buried.

Mark Steyn exposes this double-standard and "the hole at the heart of our strategy" in the Global War on Terror in his eponymous article yesterday (here).  He notes,

...We’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier.

 Steyn laments the media's dainty dances around the issue of Major Hasan's foundational worldview (Islam) and exposes their contentment with the his self-identified religious preference ("none").  But he did have a worldview.  And he did have a religious preference.  And they erupted with hellish fury.

...The pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline — his entire American identity.

How long will we pussyfoot around this IED before it blows up in our backyard? Ask the folks in Kileen, Texas.

Steyn recognizes,

The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis.

And here's the rub:

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.