The issue of Muslim pressure and a PC-afflicted Pentagon will be aired at CPAC Friday

A panel discussion on the threat posed by "Islamic supremacism," Shariah and political correctness has been scheduled for this week's Conservative Political Action Conference, stirring complaints from some American Muslims that the exercise amounts to Muslim-bashing.

The two-hour session, titled "Jihad: The Political Third Rail," is set for Friday morning, right in the middle of the three-day annual summit of conservative icons and activists in Washington, D.C.

Scheduled to speak are Steve Coughlin, a former Pentagon specialist on Islamic law who was fired two years ago, allegedly under pressure from pro-Muslim officials, and Wafa Sultan, an author and prominent critic of Islam. The discussion is billed as a window into Islam's "war on free speech," the "encroachment" of Shariah -- or Islamic law -- in the West and efforts by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate American society.

Overall, CPAC is attuned more to political strategy and domestic issues, but organizers of the "Jihad" session have been trying to stir the pot with what they call a blunt and objective discussion of Muslims' attempts to harm the West while silencing criticism.

Mission accomplished. The pot has been stirred.

How political correctness captured the Pentagon

America’s military is being destroyed by a readiness-busting political correctness (PC) because those wearing stars too often lack the courage to tell their civilian bosses “no.” That lack of courage has led to a long string of cultural PC crises – including refusal to recognize internal threats from Islamists to sex-based absurdities and misguided rules of engagement.

(snip)

The Pentagon launched a Muslim outreach program that gave “legitimacy” to some Islamic organizations promoting an ideology that shares the same objectives as al Qaeda. Soon officials such as then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England cavorted with leaders from organizations like the Islamic Society of North America, a group associated with a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood to subvert the U.S.

That outreach program created widespread military cultural fear of being vilified as “Islamaphobic” which explains why the brass ignored important warnings like that delivered by Stephen Coughlin, a military intelligence analyst. Coughlin was hired to “…set aside the feel-good assumptions about Islam … and take an unblinkered look at the facts.” He warned senior officers that there were dedicated jihadists wearing the U.S. uniform. In 2008, Coughlin was sacked as a result of a campaign undertaken by England’s Muslim aide because of Coughlin’s “Islamaphobic” views.

Mark Steyn on Fort Hood shooter:"political correctness was his enabler, every step of the way"

,,,a constrained and regulated culture policed by politically correct enforcers leads to slaughter. I’m not being speculative here, as Commissar Lynch is about my murderous prose style. It’s already happened, just a couple of weeks back. Thirteen men and women plus an unborn baby were gunned down at Fort Hood by a major in the U.S. Army. Nidal Hasan was the perpetrator, but political correctness was his enabler, every step of the way. In the days that followed, the near parodically absurd revelations piled up like an overripe satire, but a two-panel cartoon at the Toronto blogger Scaramouche’s website provided the pithiest distillation:

“This is your brain. This is your brain on political correctness”—a small and shrivelled thing.

Voters blame political correctness for failure to stop Nidal Malik Hasan's shootings at Fort Hood

Sixty-three percent (63%) of U.S. voters say political correctness prevented the military from responding to warning signs from Major Nidal Malik Hasan that could have prevented the Fort Hood shootings from taking place.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 16% disagree and do not believe political correctness kept military authorities from possibly stopping the killing of 13 people and the wounding of many others in the November 5 incident. Twenty-one percent (21%) are not sure.

Voters also have very mixed feelings about how President Obama and the Army responded to the Fort Hood incident.

Older Americans are more suspicious of political correctness than voters under 40. Whites were more likely than African-Americans to think political correctness kept the military from responding to warning signs from Hasan.

Republicans and voters not affiliated with either major political party overwhelmingly believe political correctness held the military back. That view is shared by 49% of Democrats while 23% of those in the president’s party disagree.

In a room full of soldiers, only the bad guy was armed; no Hollywood director would buy it

An unscientific poll of an unspecified number of rational American citizens found Wednesday that the country has two questions about the U.S. military effort in the Middle \East.

The questions are:

Why are we still in Iraq?

Why are we still in Afghanistan?

One notorious skeptic offered the comment that, given America's inability to establish a minimally rational government on the continental mainland, how could it achieve any semblance of rational government in distant, more primitive societies where citizens are still killing each other over events that may, or may not, have taken place in the Seventh Century.

The cranky one also noted that U.S. and allied forces are going to great lengths to stamp out poppies, Afghanistan's only cash crop, required for the making of heroin, while Mexican drug gangs are blissfully tending to marjuana farms they have set up in the middle of national parks in the American West.

Aren't American policy makers aware of the principle of substitution?

If the poppies are destroyed, perhaps the Afghan war lords will start buying marijuana from the Mexican gangs, and the war lords will fight to protect their trade routes and storage sheds? The kiling will  go on, and perhaps spread along the supply line.

Meanwhile, the Mexicans will take over more and more U.S. park land to meet the new demand from Afghanistan. Unemployed aliens in the U.S. illegally, sharing a language with the marijuana growers, will be drawn to the domestic side of the marijuana trade, enlarging America's criminal class.

Then, predictably, it will be discovered that the Mexican marijuana farmers have been receiving stimulus checks from the Obama administration.

We have been preparing for war, or waging war, for nine years. Our original motive was unambiguous. Our original attack was well planned and effective. Then the transitions began, each one murkier and less persuasive than the last.

Now, we have reached another turning point, perhaps the most consequential one since the Afghan war began. We have been attacked lethally on the home front, at least in part because of the continuing war in Afghanistan.

An American-born muslim soldier, Army Major Nadal Malik Hasan, murdered 13 and wounded many more at Fort Hood. His emails and conversations make it clear that his intent was to punish Americans for waging war against muslims.

Disarmed by a deranged liberal education establishment and its principal accomplishment, a smothering and pervasive regime of political correctness, we can't even bring ourselves to call it a terrorist attack without risking stern rebuke, or worse.

If scripted, the crime scene would have left any Hollywood director shaking his head. It was too preposterous.

In a room filled with American fighting men and women, some of them battle tested, the only one armed was the bad guy. How could that happen?
As Andrew McCarthy points out in National Review, "To stop bad things from happening, you have to come to grips with what causes them. We won’t."

 "... with Hasan, the biggest challenge was not whether to investigate an infiltrator wearing a neon 'Islamist' sign, but how to promote him up the ladder and burnish our diversity cred while intimidating the suspicious into silence.

"Mission accomplished."

No one dares speak of the recession's root cause

"There was overlending going on all over the world—yet the collapse started in a few rapidly Hispanicizing states in the U.S. Why?

You have to look at both sides of the equation: lending and repayment. In California and Company, not only was too much money being lent relative to past rates (which was happening in lots of other places, too), but, also, the earning capacity of the new homebuyers to pay back their loans was declining—as Americans moved out and Latin Americans moved in.
That double whammy in the Sand States of increasing lending and decreasing human capital is what blew the gasket on the world economy.

Of course, we also needed a third element—political correctness—to keep investors from noticing what was happening."

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