Obama should personally award Purple Hearts and apologize to the victims of Ft. Hood -- but he won't

By Investor's Business Daily

Political Correctness: The Army has announced that as a result of Congress' making victims of attacks by foreign terrorist acts eligible, the Fort Hood victims will get Purple Hearts, and civilians will get Defense of Freedom medals.

That language broadened the definition of an attack on eligible victims to include an assault by "a foreign terrorist organization." The definition includes attacks by a perpetrator or perpetrators in contact with a foreign terrorist organization or "inspired or motivated by a foreign terrorist organization" prior to the attack.

The Nov. 5, 2009, attack on Fort Hood by Maj. Nidal Hasan, in which he killed 13 and wounded 32 while shouting "Allahu Akbar!," fits the new eligibility requirements. Hasan was known to have been in contact before the attack with American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a senior leader in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and left a paper trail of support for and inspiration by Awlaki and AQAP.

President Obama, of course, is not going to personally present the long-delayed medals made possible by language included in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. That would require him to agree that Hasan was linked to, and motivated by, AQAP, a terrorist organization. That would make Fort Hood a terrorist attack and Hasan an Islamic terrorist.

"Now that Congress has changed the criteria," said Army Secretary John McHugh on Friday, "we believe there is sufficient reason to allow these men and women to be awarded and recognized with either the Purple Heart, or in the case of civilians, the Defense of Freedom medal."

And full benefits, we would hope. Up to this point, any medals or survivor benefits were ruled out by the Obama administration's monumentally foolish and insensitive designation of the Fort Hood attack as "workplace violence." Avoiding the terrorism designation meant that, besides missing out on the Purple Heart, victims and their families "do not get combat-related special compensation that provides disability pay," according to the military news site Stars and Stripes.

"Islamic terrorism" is not a phrase to be uttered by the president. He told the United Nations that the Benghazi terrorist attack was inspired by a video insulting Islam, explaining to the world body, "The future must not belong to those who insult the prophet of Islam." That's what the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was accused of doing before a terrorist attack killed eight of its employees.

Nor will we ever hear this president — who claimed in a grotesque distortion of history that included slavery and the Crusades that "people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ" — acknowledge that Islam was spread through centuries of military conquest and barbarism to which the current breed of Islamic terrorists wish to return.

Nor will he ever speak of people committing terrible deeds in the name of Muhammad.

Islam, he tells us, has been hijacked by a small percentage of people who falsely claim to be Islamic. The Islamic State is neither Islamic nor a state, he says. Yet somehow Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill managed to speak of "Nazi Germany" though not all Germans were members of the Nazi Party (as few as 6% as of 1940).

We think that Obama should get off his particular "high horse" and personally present the awards to the victims of the Fort Hood terrorist attack. And while he's at it, he should apologize for the slap in the face that was his administration's "workplace violence" designation.

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