The Bristol Herald Courier of Sunday, Nov. 8, was interesting, but perhaps not for the reason you might think initially.
The editorial on the Fort Hood tragedy, in its final paragraph, stated “and at the very least, the Army will have to answer how this man (Hasan) was able to get to his position in the military branch. If nothing else, we can say that something was not right with him, and that is something the Army should have realized sooner.”
Then, in a commentary piece by J. Todd Foster on the next page, you essentially apologized for a story “about a former radical Muslim (Shoebat) who converted to Christianity and now preaches about the evils of Islam.”
The thing that really makes it interesting is an AP article by Allen G. Breed “There’s something wrong with you: Suspect told.” The story is on an inside page, with the real key to your editorial buried at the end of page 4. Most people don’t get this deep in articles inside the paper. Here the writer states: “His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan’s ‘Anti-American propaganda,’ but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.”
It looks like political correctness, fueled by the news media and by politicians, played a large part in killing our Fort Hood soldiers. I watched interviews of ranking Army officials. Not once did I hear a media representative ask if the attack could have been a terrorist attack. Why? Perhaps it would not have been politically correct?
Many questions had absolutely nothing to do with the shootings. The questions, often prefaced with an editorial statement, were about the suicide rate of returning soldiers, whether the Army had enough soldiers to perform its mission, what was being done to treat returning soldiers, etc.
Can you image the firestorm if Hasan had been discharged from the Army and the news media and politicians decided to take it as a cause?
You can write your own headlines, but they would have been in the tone of a poor innocent Muslim being persecuted just because he is a Muslim. I guarantee officers up through General level would have been fired.
The real story is not so much the shooting, but the political correctness movement that permitted it to happen.
Thomas P. Vaughan
Bristol, Tenn.
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