Editorial: Where political correctness leads

A scientist, Stewart Nozette, was charged with espionage after an agent posing as an Israeli spy set him up. Israel was not involved in the case in any way.

“There is a faction in the counterintelligence bureaucracies that is ... methodically trying to create the impression that Mossad is under every bed," Steve Rosen told The Jerusalem Post. He and a fellow AIPAC staffer recently were cleared of charges they passed classified information to Israel.

"Chances are, you won't get [security] clearance,” if you have relatives in Israel, speak Hebrew, or practice Orthodox Judaism, the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman maintained in the same report.

We point this out not to claim that it is impossible for a Jew to, in fact, have dual loyalties and become a spy (see Pollard, Jonathan), but to note that, as remote as the possibility might be, the federal government takes it seriously, to the point of going far overboard in its precautions. No political correctness is evident. Instead, the government has been deprived of the services of highly qualified individuals who happen to be Jewish.

Contrast this with the politically correct, if not criminally negligent myopia that apparently inflicted military personnel up and down the chain of command who knew Major Nidal Malik Hasan before his Jihadist rampage at Fort Hood last week. 13 people were murdered.

Hasan is a native-born American citizen of Palestinian descent who received his medical training in the military.

Reporting from various sources has found that the Army psychiatrist once left fellow medical personnel wondering if he would one day snap in precisely the way he did; that he has had recent contact with Al Qaeda and with a former Virginia imam, now in Yemen, who calls for violence and terrorism against the West; and other items of information that should have been red flags, if not brightly colored fireworks, to anyone not blinded by a desire to not offend delicate Muslim sensibilities.

Being of the Muslim faith should not preclude service in the military or the government. Automatically assuming dual loyalty, or worse, homicidal intent is as unfair to Americans of the Muslim faith as the aforementioned FBI and CIA suspicions are to Orthodox Jews. As unfair as it was to intern every person of Japanese extraction on US soil during World War II.

But that doesn't mean — it shouldn't mean, it can't mean — that everyone gets a free pass. The military, the FBI and the CIA must finally take seriously the possibility that there are others in the ranks — perhaps many others — who pose the same threat as Hasan.