[Vision2020] Muslims Have Died to Defend U.S. (Leonard Pitts)

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of a fellow Vision 2020 subscriber and friend . . .

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Leonard Pitts: Muslims have died to defend U.S.

Why are these Muslim invaders allowed to carry on freely in this country —
protected by outreach, Obama and PC mental illness?"

"Simply put, most Muslims in non-Islamic countries have an evil ax to
grind and a scurrilous hidden agenda."

"Muslims should be deported from this country! They offer nothing to
Americans!"

This outburst of vituperation from message boards and bloggers is, of
course, traceable to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist and
American Muslim accused of shooting 13 people dead and wounding 29 others
in a rampage last month at Fort Hood, Texas. At this writing, we still
know next to nothing of why he did it.

Maybe he was a stone-cold psychopath like Eric Harris who, with Dylan
Klebold, shot up Columbine High in 1999.

Maybe he was deranged and delusional like Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32
people and himself at Virginia Tech in 2007.

Maybe he was driven by a grudge against the federal government like
Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a federal building in 1995.

Maybe he was a terrorist.

Predictably, it is the last possibility that ignited outrage and
condemnation from the usual speak-first, think-later types, employing the
usual sweeping half-truths and untruths to argue that Muslims are
un-American and contribute nothing to this country.

One wonders what they would say, then, to Cpl. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan,
U.S. Army, Muslim, American, killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

Or to Spc. Rasheed Sahib, U.S. Army, Muslim, American, accidentally shot
to death by a fellow soldier in Iraq.

Or to Maj. James Ahearn, U.S. Army, Muslim, American, killed by a bomb in
Iraq.

Or to Capt. Humayun Khan, U.S. Army, Muslim, American, killed when he
approached a suicide bomber in Iraq.

Would they continue in loud ignorance? Or would they simply, finally, shut
up?

The latter is probably too much to hope: The majority is often eager to
stamp the minority with the worst actions of its worst members. The
minority is left to wonder why only its worst are judged emblematic, while
its best are forgotten or ignored.

So it is for Muslims now — sacrifices and service unremembered and
unremarked.

If you study the list of recent American casualties, you find names
redolent of every other place on Earth, names that smell of Scottish
highlands and Korean marketplaces, Yemeni ports and Nigerian mosques,
Russian steppes and Mexican farms.

All of them choosing to make their lives here in the land of burger
joints, rap music and amber waves of grain — a land where, it is boasted,
a man is not his past, a man is not his culture, a man is not his tribe. A
man is a man.

It is an ideal never fully realized and yet an ideal soldiers with names
from every other place on Earth sign up every day to defend. That ought to
tell you something. It ought to make you proud.

And it ought to leave you impatient with the shrill, intolerant voices who
would have us believe Nidal Malik Hasan is every Muslim in America.

For what it's worth, those same voices sang out when Japanese-American
soldiers left internment camps to fight for freedom. And when
African-American soldiers went abroad to defend democracy, then came home
and were lynched still wearing their uniforms.

The story is told of a black woman who refused to salute the American flag
and scorned her father, a veteran, because he did. Finally, he explained:
He did not stand to honor the nation as it was, but the nation as it could
be if only it embraced its own ideals.

One suspects his reasoning would resonate today with the Muslim-American
soldier walking his post in the wake of the shooting at Fort Hood. He
stands up for his country.

Let us hope his country will do the same for him.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change
and the Realist adjusts his sails."

- Unknown