Muslims should be more vocal in denouncing extremism

Over the course of the last several days, more information has been made public about the suspected perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan. With each new development a more disturbing picture accrues - one that strongly challenges the emerging meme that Hasan's actions were the mere result of mental derangement, emotional distress, or opposition to the wars currently being raged in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By all indications, Hasan was profoundly influenced by radical Islam, and red flags, such as his proselytizing to colleagues and waxing eloquent about suicide bombers, were everywhere prior to last Thursday's fateful events. But rather than confronting these issues, Hasan's actions fell into the memory hole of military bureaucracy. The end result is that thirteen people lost their lives in a burst of heinous violence that may have been avoided.

The initial reaction to Hasan's alleged crimes was a call for objectivity, which was justified given the circumstances and vacuum of concrete information that existed in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. However, it's increasingly apparent that Hasan was more than just a troubled soul, and the implications of his actions have far-reaching implications for the Western world. When put into the appropriate context, Hasan's actions increasingly bear the hallmarks of a homegrown extremist, not completely dissimilar from those who perpetrated the bombings in seen in Madrid in 2004 or London in 2005.

Contrary to growing conventional wisdom, the primary threat to our society does not come from anti-Muslim sentiment. Since September 11th and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to separate Islamic terrorists from Muslims who practice their faith peacefully. Alas, those efforts have had little appreciable impact on those who continue to plot against the U.S., or those who use U.S. foreign policy as a convenient scapegoat to excuse the actions of jihadists.

In the aftermath of 9/11, there was much discussion about the need for everyday, mainstream Muslims to denounce violence and extremism. While this has occurred to some degree, a major problem is that such efforts are often sporadic, reactionary and half-hearted. Most Americans are naturally inclined to co-exist peacefully with Muslims, but the lack of emphasis placed on rejecting extremism within Islam is the biggest impediment to reconciling Islam with the Western world.

Renouncing acts of violence after they occur, or in order to indulge political correctness, is no longer sufficient. As a society, we are rapidly approaching a tipping point that will determine whether Muslims and non-Muslims can peacefully coexist. While the default position of extremists has been to blame American and the Western world, the time has long since passed for Muslims to take a far more active role in rooting out the extremism that gestates in the dark recesses of Islamic fundamentalism.

We are engaged in a generation-defining struggle between freedom and repressive, murderous fundamentalism that doesn't distinguish between combatants and innocents.
The Fort Hood shootings should also serve as a wake-up call for those who believe that hostile extremists whose beliefs are fundamentally in opposition to those of a free society can be placated through symbolism or fuzzy rhetoric.