Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online

So it turns out that the worst Islamist terrorist strike since 9/11 — an attack that killed twice as many Americans as were slain in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — was not a terrorist attack at all. Just ask the FBI.

The initial hurried reports of thirteen people (including twelve U.S. soldiers) murdered, and dozens of others wounded, were just coming in. A pained Diane Sawyer was wishing aloud that Nidal Malik Hasan were named “Smith.” Her colleagues in what now passes for mainstream journalism were risibly theorizing that post-traumatic stress disorder must have snapped this non-combat Army psychiatrist — one who’d screamed “Allahu akbar!” while mowing down U.S. soldiers about to deploy to a Muslim country for a war he’d made no secret of deploring; one whose only battlefield experience was the massacre he’d just committed against unarmed men and women in a Fort Hood training center.

Then, like the cavalry, the FBI came riding to the PC rescue. The Federal Bureau of Let’s Skip the Investigation pronounced that the killing was not terrorism. Forget about Islamic (or at least Islamist) terrorism. This mass murder wasn’t even terrorism.

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The FBI and the rest of our Islamophilic government have their story, and they’re sticking to it. The terrorists’ siege on our nation has nothing to do with Islam. It is the work of al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda terrorists — so the catechism goes — are not true Muslims. Sure, Osama bin Laden & Co. accurately quote Islamic scriptural injunctions to wage jihad against non-Muslims. But never mind that: Islam is an irenic, unmitigated good; in fact, it is one of our best weapons against terrorism.

Come again? If all the terrorists are Muslims and all the terrorists say scriptures that plainly command killing are inspiring them to kill, how could Islam be an asset? Don’t go spoiling a feel-good theory by asking a lot of questions — that would be almost like an investigation, and when it comes to Islam, the FBI doesn’t do investigation.

If it did, it might stumble onto all sorts of things we’d just as soon not know. We’d have to start acknowledging that Salafist ideology (the strain of Islam endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni terrorist organizations) is prevalent in American mosques. We’d have to concede that beliefs we optimistically call “radical” are actually quite mainstream among American Muslims and predominant among Muslims overseas — including the beliefs that sharia (the law of Islam) should govern the United States, that Muslims must resist American military and law-enforcement operations against other Muslims, that the U.S. military presence in Islamic countries renders American soldiers and those who support them legitimate targets of jihadist terror, and that Israel, America’s democratic ally in the Middle East, should not exist.

Obviously, this reality of Islam defies the government’s wishful fiction. So the FBI doesn’t do Islam. It does politics. And if you’re going to do politics, you can’t do preventive counterterrorism of the kind the FBI, the Justice Department, the Homeland Security Department, the intelligence community, and the rest of Leviathan promised to do right after 9/11.

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