Obama's Rush to Judgment

Barack Hussein Obama has advised us not to rush to judgment about the massacre at Fort Hood. “We don’t know all the answers yet. And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts,” said the President in a statement he delivered from the Rose Garden (while George W. Bush was in Fort Hood).

Obama doesn’t want us to jump to the conclusion that the shootings at Fort Hood were a terrorist attack by an Islamic jihadist, Major Nidal Hasan. Obama would rather we forgot that Nidal Hasan screamed “Allah akbar” before he mowed down scores of patriotic Americans and gave away Qurans with his business card before his act of jihad. Hasan also gave his landlord two week’s notice – showing that he planned this for a long time. He didn’t just snap.

Obama wants us to ignore that Hasan went to a mosque where a jihadist imam preached hatred of America. The same imam was “spiritual adviser” for three of the 9/11 hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001. Obama would rather we didn’t know that when Hasan was asked his nationality, he didn’t identify himself as an American, but as a Palestinian. Obama doesn’t want us to rush to judgment about how Hasan spoke approvingly of the shooting death by an Islamic jihad terrorist of a Little Rock Army recruiter in June. Obama doesn’t us to draw any conclusions from how Hasan reportedly was heard saying, “maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square.”

But Obama says, don’t rush to judgment.

The President was not so circumspect when he spoke out about Professor Henry Louis Gates’ arrest by Cambridge, Massachusetts police Sgt. James Crowley. Obama incited hatred on national television, rushing to judgment against a white cop who was just doing his job. Obama tried to incite racial division and wrongly criticized the police during a news conference: “But I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, No. 3 … that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” The incident, Obama said, showed “how race remains a factor in this society.”

A few days later, after an avalanche of criticism, Obama backtracked: “In my choice of words,” he said, “I unfortunately, I think, gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Crowley specifically.” But he did not apologize for his rush to judgment.

Apparently jumping to conclusions is wrong only when it leads to the conclusion that there has been another Islamic terror attack on American soil.

But to come to that conclusion really doesn’t involve any “rush to judgment” at all. What we know about Nidal Hasan makes that abundantly clear. He wrote “Allah” on his door, according to a neighbor, in Arabic. “Allah” on the door. During his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences, he was reprimanded for preaching Islam to his patients and other doctors. He drew attention from law enforcement officials with Internet postings under his name that praised suicide bombing, saying that their intention was to “save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers,” and that “if one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.”

This was not the act of a crazy person. This was not the random act of a nutcase. Hasan committed murder execution style, at close range. He shot 44 to 50 rounds – that’s a lot of ammunition to come out of those two guns in such a short period of time. This was premeditated.

But Obama doesn’t want us to rush to judgment. Maybe that’s because Nidal Hasan was an adviser to the Homeland Security Policy Institute’s presidential transition task force. The task force was not an official White House entity, but it did make policy recommendations.

And why not? Everyone was too scared to be called a bigot for saying Nidal Hasan was dangerous. Or they just assumed he was a “moderate.”

Like Obama, they rushed to judgment.