Twelve solders and one civilian army employee were massacred by Maj. Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, on November 5 at Ft. Hood, Texas. Maj. Hasan injured another thirty people, some critically, before being shot himself by the local police.

Will the soldiers whom Hasan killed or injured in this latest terrorist assault receive the Purple Heart?

In my view, they should. But whether they do depends on how the Obama administration decides to spin the episode. If it determines that the soldiers were victims of criminal assault, the answer is No: they do not get this most somber military decoration.

But if the Obama administration determines that those soldiers were injured or killed in the line of duty, then they are eligible for the Purple Heart. [UPDATE: the always excellent Diana West beat me to the punch with this insightful column about Ft. Hood and the Purple Heart.]

It’s tricky for Obama. His administration is devoted to transforming the jihadist war against the West into a civilian conflict. Hence the heavy odor of political correctness that has hung about Ft. Hood since November 5 when Maj. Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire.

Perhaps the most nauseating PC emission came from General George Casey, the army’s top officer, who told CNN that he was “concerned” that “speculation” about Maj. Hasan’s motivation in mowing down those 40-odd people at Ft. Hood “could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”

Is he really?

Care to savor an unadulterated gem of political correctness? You cannot do better than this:

” . . . as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

That’s General George Casey again — one for the record books, I’d say. I’m sure that non-Muslim soldiers in the U.S. Army the world over appreciate his sensitivity and will once again rest easy. Is Mohammed polishing his revolver in the bunk opposite? Never mind. This is the modern Army, committed to diversity. Some soldiers fight the enemies of America. These days, we have to have soldiers who regard America as the enemy. Be all you can be.

New Yorkers, too, will be able to rest more easily now that the Obama administration has decided to remove 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorist conspirators from the jurisdiction of the military and hand them over to a New York criminal court to be tried. Are you interested in learning how to transform a mass murderer into a totemic hero for America’s enemies the world over? Stayed tuned. President Obama is just about to show you how it is done. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, speaking at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention yesterday, rightly blasted this return to a September 10 mentality that supposes “acts like the first World Trade Center bombing [in 1993], the attacks on our embassies in Africa and other such acts can and should be treated as conventional crimes and tried in conventional courts.” Not only will this disgorge a “cornucopia” of sensitive intelligence information to public scrutiny, but it will also provide other jihadists with a tempting target of opportunity.

In “The Purloined Letter,” Edgar Allan Poe showed that sometimes the best place to conceal something is in plain sight. Somehow, we overlook what we can’t avoid. The case of Maj. Nidal Hasan and his murderous rampage at Ft. Hood reminds us that a similar process is at work in the career of Islam in the West. The truth couldn’t be plainer: Islam is a creed violently at odds with secular liberal society.

There are two planks to Obama’s foreign policy. One is the presumption that America is in the wrong. Hence Obama’s habit, as he travels around the world, of apologizing for America. The whole idea of “American exceptionalism,” he has explained, is wrong. If America is “exceptional,” it is only in the sense that every nation is exceptional — i.e., it is not exceptional at all.

The other plank of Obama’s foreign policy revolves around America’s “special relationship” with Britain. The phrase was coined by Winston Churchill in his famous “Sinews of Peace” speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. (It was the same speech in which he foresaw an “iron curtain” descending over Eastern Europe.) For Barack Obama, however, there is no special relationship with Britain. Hence it is not surprising that one of his first acts as President of the United States was to pack up the bust of Winston Churchill that had enjoyed an honored place in the White House and send it back home to the Brits. Just in case they didn’t take the hint, he has repeatedly snubbed Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Fortunately, Obama’s policy of reflexive anti-Americanism and repudiation of a country with which we have the strongest social, moral, and political filiation is not going unchallenged. One of the bright spots on the current international scene is The Atlantic Bridge. Founded in the late 1990s with Margaret Thatcher as its honorary patron, the Atlantic Bridge is devoted to “strengthening the special relationship” between the U.S. and Great Britain. In 2007, Rudolph Guiliani delivered the inaugural Margaret Thatcher Lecture hosted by the Atlantic Bridge.

This year, in London, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger delivered delivered the Thatcher lecture and was awarded the Atlantic Bridge’s Medal of Freedom by Baroness Thatcher for “tireless dedication to academia, public service, and peace.” It was a moving event: despite her age and ailments, Margaret Thatcher radiated serene confidence and Dr. Kissinger delivered an inspiring if melancholy talk. He underscored the importance, to the world as well as to both countries, of the special relationship between Britain and America. He also underscored the importance of strong leadership: a talent expertly deployed by Margaret Thatcher but in short supply in Washington these days. The event took place on November 10, a day after the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. That world historical event was seen by many as a harbinger of a coming reign of peace and international comity. It hasn’t worked out that way, of course. Indeed, the world is a far more dangerous place now than in 1989. Henry Kissinger reminded us of what is at stake in the relationship between America and Great Britain. In the end, it is nothing less than the future of political liberty. The Atlantic Bridge is an important curator of that liberty. It is registered as a charity on both sides of the Atlantic. I hope you will consider making a donation to help it pursue its mission.

Every phone call. Every email. Every text message. Every web site visited. I land at Heathrow and discover that Big Brother in England will be recording it all: the entire electronic career of every private citizen will salted away for a year in a gigantic database and “available for monitoring by government bodies.” Six-hundred and fifty-three government bodies, to be precise, including the police and local council authorities. They will not need a warrant from a judge but only the authorisation of a “senior” police officer or equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority to rifle through who you’ve talked to when about what. This is more or less the equivalent of a hall pass in your local high school. Adding insult to injury, the British taxpayers are going to be forced to fork over some £2 billion to spy on themselves. According to the London Daily Telegraph, the “Intercept Modernisation Programme,” as this hideous assault on freedom is officially denominated, will allow any public authority to see the internet addresses, dates, times, and recipients of calls made by every citizen in the kingdom. Only 29 percent of the British people are in favor of this preposterous scheme. But the Home Office insists that it will push it through anyway. In this post-democratic era, what does the will of the people mean when put up against the inclinations of political bureaucrats?

Britain, once the cradle of political liberty, is now leading the world in capitulating to the the soft-totalitarian forces that would gobble up freedom for the sake of central control. I have been quoting this observation of David Hume frequently of late: seldom is freedom lost all at once. Here in England we have another example of how it oozes away. Sad. Expensive. And frightening.

Today, November 9, 2009, marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Looking back, it is difficult not to feel a celebratory thrill: if the Berlin Wall was a sort of objective correlative of Communist tyranny — the perfect architectural summary of its soul-blighting aspirations — its dramatic fall seemed like a primaeval upsurge of freedom. Looking around us now, however, it is clear that our euphoria was premature, or at least that it must be sharply qualified. For although the fall of the Berlin Wall presaged the fall of the Soviet Empire a scant two years later, it did not, as was widely predicted, spell the end of the nightmare Communism constructed. Indeed, everywhere one looks, from Moscow to, alas, Washington the centralizing, socialist imperative is making a come back. An irony of history? No doubt. As I note in “Tyranny Set in Stone,” my contribution to a symposium on the subject in this month’s New Criterion,

The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall provides an opportune moment to remind ourselves what was at stake in the Cold War — what still is at stake on the perpetual battleground of freedom. I know that sounds histrionic. But the fall of the Berlin Wall — the first act whose denouement was the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later — is a contemporary as well as a historical subject. That is to say, we have not written finis to that chapter of our moral history. It is not clear that we ever will. As Leszek Kolakowski, one of our greatest genealogists of Marxism, observed in 2002,

communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, nor the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was a real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century, and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just “human stupidity,” or “human corruptibility.” The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life.

As we look around the world today, a melancholy spectacle greets our gaze. The Soviet Union is no more, but a minatory if diminished Russia has taken its place. A possibly nuclear Iran. A confirmed nuclear North Korea and Pakistan. Preposterous anti-American strongmen like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. An increasingly rampant threat of Islamofascism. The enemies of freedom and the West are more numerous than ever. It is here that the two deepest lessons of the Berlin Wall lie. First, that tyranny frankly confronted can be defeated. But, second, that the victory of freedom is never final: it must always be renewed not only through our willingness to acknowledge and struggle against evil, but also through a forthright proclamation of our own founding principles. It is this last requirement of freedom that seems most difficult for Western intellectuals. To quote Kolakowski once more, there is “one Great Cause that has persisted more or less intact throughout the past decades in the Leftist mentality: the loathing of democratic countries. Allegiances changed, but if there was something enduring in Leftist politics, it was this: in any conflict between a tyrannical and democratic country, the tyrants were right and democracy wrong.” One would have thought that the admonitory tale of the Berlin Wall would provide an incontrovertible disabusement. Alas, it is a lesson we have yet to absorb.

All of the essays from this special section of November’s New Criterion are freely available online. The other essays are:

“Citizens into Prisoners,” by Henry A. Kissinger

“Weak Will, High Wall,” by Donald Kagan

“Russia Before the Mirror,” by Jonathan Brent

“The Costs of Abstraction,” by Anthony Daniels

Yesterday, in the dead of night, the U.S. House of Representatives took a small step for Nancy Pelosi and a giant step for despotism.

Freedom, David Hume famously observed, is seldom lost all at once. More often, it leaks out slowly. The petty tyranny of good intentions colludes with the bureaucratic imperative to stymie individual initiative and barter liberty for the sake of central control.

Last night, it happened by a slender margin: 220 votes to 215. Thirty-nine Democrats voted against the 1900-page bill. One Republican — first- and (I suspect) last-term Anh Cao of Louisiana — voted for it. You can see the entire roster of votes at http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/roll887.xml. Did your congressman just vote to further impoverish the country, rob you of choice in managing your medical care, and arrogate to Washington decisions that should be left to the individual? Consult that list and remember next year and in 2012.

Pace Nancy Pelosi, you do not have to put up with this economically disastrous assault on freedom. You still — just barely — have a say in how you are governed. Please do not fritter it away. Slowly, now not slowly, your prerogatives are being whittled away as bureaucrats in Washington tell you what, and what not, to eat, how to light and heat your house, how much money you may make, what sort of car your must drive, how you must, and must not, educate your children, what sort of medical care you must, and must not, arrange for yourself.

I have in this space several times argued that the Obama administration’s efforts to take over health care is only incidentally concerned with enlarging or improving access to medical care. At bottom, it is about enlarging Washington’s control over your life.

David Harsanyi, in an excellent column at RealClearPolitics, provides a partial inventory of diminishment:

> The word “regulation” appears 181 times.
> “Tax” is there 214 times.
> “Fees,” 103 times.

More regulation. Higher taxes. More fees. Is that what Nancy Pelosi means by “affordable health care”?

My sunny thoughts about the once-again great states of New Jersey (welcome, Governor Christie!) and Virginia (ditto, Governor McDonnell!) are not displaced by the (to me) disappointing and (to everyone) surprising news that Doug Hoffman lost to Bill Owens in New York’s 23rd Congressional District.

There has been a great deal of hand wringing and pundit-izing over that result: How did it happen? Why? What does it mean? If you work for Barack Obama, it means that the entire country is still drunk on his promises of Hope-n-Change while the defeat of Messrs. Jon Corzine and that chap–what’s his name?–from Virginia tell us absolutely nothing about the mood of the country. Poor Nancy Pelosi, who has progressed from the surreal to the positively delusional, seems to have regarded election 2009 as a victory for the Democrats. I hope we’ll be seeing more such victories next year and in 2012.

But back to Doug Hoffman. What happened? After super-RINO Dede Scozzafava crashed, burned, and dropped out of the race, many commentators supposed that by endorsing the Democrat Owens she merely underscored her own petulance and political irrelevance. Hoffman’s surge in the polls, they thought, would carry him all the way to victory. Well, it didn’t happen, Why? My friend Roger Simon spoke for many when he suggested that Hoffman’s patent social conservatism was the issue and, ultimately, the kiss of death. “America,” Roger argues, “is a fiscally conservative country — now perhaps more than ever, and with much justification — but not a socially conservative one.” Not, he hastens to add, that it is socially liberal: “It’s not. It’s socially laissez-faire (just as its mostly fiscally laissez-faire). Whether we’re pro-choice, pro-life or whatever we are, most of us want the government out of our bedrooms, just as we want it out of our wallets.”

According to Roger,

Hoffman’s capital-C Conservative campaign . . . tried to separate itself from the majority parties by making a big deal of the social issues. He was all upset that Scozzafava was pro-gay marriage, seemingly as upset as he was with her support for the stimulus plan. He projected the image of a bluenose in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear about these things. Hoffman’s is a selective vision of the nanny state — you can nanny about some things but not about others. I suspect America deeply dislikes nannying about anything.

I wish Roger were right about Americans disliking “nannying about anything.” Alas, I suspect many Americans crave it more and more. As exhibit A, I direct your attention to what happened elsewhere in New York: in New York City, Michael Bloomberg, a veritable black belt nannier, was elected to a third term. This is the man, remember, who outlawed smoking, who tells you what sort of fat you may eat, who frowns upon salt, who puts cameras in taxicabs and on the street, and who volunteers to help Santa Claus each Christmas to determine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.

Just in case your survey of the world scene has left you with a residue of cheerfulness, below is a video of a talk given by Lord Christopher Monckton at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, last week that should complete your gloom.

The ostensible subject was the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Treaty, scheduled to take place in December. Anyone who doubts that environmentalism has become one of the most potent weapons in the quiver of the international Left should take a look at some of the treaty’s proposed provisions. Basically, it is a wealth transfer scheme in which rich countries send money to poor countries because they, the rich ones, have (so the story goes) done more to insult the environment. (Isn’t the real story that they have enriched the entire world beyond imagining? Yes–but that contravenes the left-wing narrative.) Take a look at what the U.N. has in store for you: It has to be read to be believed. These items from Article 7 will give you a flavor of the thing:

1. A massive scaling up of financial resources, from both the public and private sectors, is required in order to adequately, sufficiently and swiftly reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions, adapt to climate change and achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention and the shared vision. Developing country Parties will require significant, stable and predictable financial support from industrialized country Parties in order to fulfill their commitments under this Protocol.

2. Parties included in Annex B shall, as a group, provide at least [n.b, at least!] 160 billion USD per year for the 2013-2017 commitment period as financial support to developing country Parties for their low carbon development, technology, adaptation and reducing emissions from deforestation efforts in line with Articles 4, 5, 8 and 9. Additional financing is required and shall be made available for the reporting requirements and capacity building efforts under this Protocol. The scale of resources required shall be reviewed for each subsequent commitment period.

What does it all mean? Lord Monckton gives an appropriately scary summary in his talk. Chief items:

> Creation of a world government.

> Massive transfer of wealth form the countries of the West to the Third World countries to satisfy “climate debt.”

> Enforcement.

Regarding the last, Lord Monckton has this to say:

How many of you think that the word election or democracy . . . or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of the treaty? Quite right it doesn’t appear once. So at last, the Communists to piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left. . . . Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a Communist world government on the world. You have a President who has very strong sympathies with that point of view.

Michael Mukasey, the last Attorney General to serve under George W. Bush, has an essential essay in The Wall Street Journal today. It’s called “Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists,” and its caption explains something very important that I hope Eric Holder, the current Attorney General, will take on board as he contemplates cleansing Guantanamo Bay of its prisoners and turning its inmates over to the more tender mercies of the U.S. Justice system. “We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts,” the caption begins. “In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.”

That is a fact that the transnational, multicultural progressives who are now running America really need to understand. I know that the default mode in Washington now is to apologize for America, to believe that accommodation and capitulation are the new, improved fashion in patriotism. But please tell me that they also understand that the world is a dangerous place, that there are many people — and many regimes — that wish us ill, that the threat of Islamism has not dissipated in the wake of 9/11 but has merely gone underground where it is plotting, planning, bidding its time. In New York, the FBI foiled a major plot just a few weeks ago. In London, hundreds of Muslims have taken to the streets, braying for the head of visiting Dutch politician and Geert Wilders — the “dog” Geert Wilders as one protester denominated him in this video, which should have been aired on every major outlet, but has not been.

My greatest fear about the Obama administration at the moment is that its principals do not understand evil. They are, at bottom, followers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, even if they’ve never read a word of that misguided sage. They believe that man everywhere was born good and does bad things because of a faulty upbringing, poverty, or a lack of the right sort of community organization in his life.

It’s a child’s, or, rather, a spoiled adolescent’s view of the world. Mr. Mukasey is an adult:

critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. True, this won us a great deal of goodwill abroad-people around the globe lined up for blocks outside our embassies to sign the condolence books. That is the kind of goodwill we can do without.

Amen to that.

Damage control time!

–She didn’t mean it.
–She was only quoting a Republican operative.
–Fox News is mean to Democrats.
–Glenn Beck is an extremist.
–The President is trying to clean up a big mess left by George Bush.
–Can’t we just change the subject?

When Glenn Beck aired a video of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Chairman Mao — one of her “two favorite political philosophers” — in front of an audience of high school students, the conservative blogosphere lit up like a non-denominational sustainably harvested Kwanza tree. I wrote about it here. Andrew McCarthy added some historical background here. Peter Wehner had this to say. Et, I need hardly say, cetera.

There’s one part of the left-wing reaction to the obloquy heaped upon Anita Dunn that should not be allowed to go unchallenged. It might go like this: “George Bush quoted Mao [or Stalin, or Hitler, or some other bad guy]: does that make him a Maoist [or Stalinist, a Nazi, or whatever]?”

As Fausta Wertz points out, Anita Dunn offered a variant of this exculpatory strategy when she claimed, in reaction to the tsunami of criticism her remarks occasioned, that she was only quoting Lee Atwater.

Let’s say that Mr. Atwater had quoted the bit from Mao that Anita Dunn quoted — you fight your war and I’ll fight mine, etc., etc. So what? Lee Atwater did not identify Mao as one of his two favorite political philosophers. He did not stand before a room full of high school students and praise the revolutionary tactics of the greatest mass murderer in history.

Bottom line: it is one thing to quote a tyrant. It is another to endorse his view of the world.

Jeremiah Wright. William Ayers. Van Jones. Where does the rogues’ gallery of Barack Obama’s radical friends end? These people are not liberals. They are not “progressives.” They are radicals who hate America and in many cases have advocated or even perpetrated violence in an effort to destroy it.

Thanks to Glenn Beck, the American public has now been introduced to yet another radical member of Obama’s inner circle: Anita Dunn, Interim White House Communications Director, former top advisor to Obama’s political campaign, and wife of Obama’s personal lawyer, Robert Bauer.

In a speech before high school students last June, Dunn spoke passionately about her two favorite political philosophers, “the two people I turn to most” for answers to important questions like “how to do things that have never been done before.” Who are these paragons? One was Mother Teresa. Dunn didn’t have much to say about her. Most of her enthusiasm was lavished upon her other favorite fount of political wisdom: Mao Tse-Tung.

Mao Tse-Tung. That would be the deviant monster who, quite apart from his disgusting personal life, engineered the mass murder of anywhere from 50 to over 100 million people. Estimates vary so widely because murder on that wholesale scale is difficult to tabulate, especially in a country as backwards as China was under Mao’s long reign. But there is little doubt that Mao has the grisly distinction of being the greatest mass murderer in history.

Yet this is the man that one of Obama’s closest advisors commends to an audience with warmth and enthusiasm. In 1947, she tells her audience, Chiang Kai-Shek seemed to hold all the cards: he had the army, the airforce, and yet Mao went on to victory, telling people, as Anita Dunn told her listeners, “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.” Don’t believe me? Listen: