At least for the time being, the award for the most hysterical overreaction to the Fort Hood murders goes to Bryan Fischer, the Director of Issue Analysis for the American Family Association. Fischer is not among those sticking his head in the sand about Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s Islamic motivations or associations, oh no. Instead, he is taking those and applying them to all American Muslims:

“It it is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military. The reason is simple: the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security. Devout Muslims, who accept the teachings of the Prophet as divinely inspired, believe it is their duty to kill infidels.”

Uh, no. The more extreme a Muslim is, the more likely he or she is to think that killing infidels is their duty. A devout Sufi, on the other hand, is unlikely to be a threat to anyone.

This illustrates one problem that plagues us in a lot of our public discourse about Islam: ignorance on the part of those who so readily shoot off their mouths.

“Yesterday’s massacre is living proof. And yesterday’s incident is not the first fragging incident involving a Muslim taking out his fellow U.S. soldiers.”

No, it wasn’t the first such incident. So what’s your point? Over the years, there have been several incidents of pro-life Christians killing abortion doctors. Does that mean that we should conclude that no pro-life Christian should ever be allowed in the same city as an abortion clinic, or that all pro-life Christians should be denied gun permits?

Of course, most U.S. Muslims don’t shoot up their fellow soldiers.
But Fischer is going to smear them all with the same broad brush anyway.

“Fine. As soon as Muslims give us a foolproof way to identify their jihadis from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to serve. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms.
This is not Islamophobia, it is Islamo-realism.”

No, actually it is bigotry, plain and simple. It is extrapolating from the actions of one to the actions of many, and seeking to place restrictions on the many because of fear that a few of them will turn out to be like the one. It is assuming guilt before crimes have even been committed. It is exactly the mindset that created one of the biggest stains on America’s reputation, namely the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

None of which is to say that the government, and especially the military, should be practicing political correctness at the expense of people’s safety. There were plenty of warning signs in Hasan’s case, signs that should have resulted in his discharge from the Army and perhaps subsequent surveillance by law enforcement. If those signs had been treated with the seriousness that they deserved, without regard to whether some people would get their feelings hurt, 13 murdered soldiers would be alive today. But none of that warrants the kind of hysterical, paranoid response that Bryan Fischer offers.

Posted by David Fischler on The Reformed Pastor blog