Here’s something else that we’ll all bury our heads in the sand about, if we know what’s good for us.  Nidal Hasan was a member of an independent panel offering advice to President Obama on homeland security issues, (Hat Tip: Scott Madsen)

The gunman who killed 12 people today at Ft. Hood appears, based on current media reports, to be Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan who was listed as a participant in a Homeland Security Policy Institute’s presidential transition task force last year.

The task force was not officially affiliated with the White House. It was a project of the Homeland Security Policy Institute, an independent thinktank housed at George Washington University, aimed at drafting policy recommendations for the incoming Obama administration.

According to the task force’s May 2009 report [pdf], a “Nidal Hasan” from the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine was a task force event participant. Other participants included Senate and House staffers, Department of Homeland Security officials, Defense Department officials, and reporters for Politico, the Washington Post, and the London Times….

I’m sure you feel safer already. I realise that this was an independent group that is not officially affiliated with the Obama adminstration, but all the same, you’d have thought that somebody would do a little checking into the background, opinions, and written works of the members of a board that will be presenting policy recommendations to the President of the United States, would you not? Like the fact that he expressed support for suicide bombers on publicly-accessible Islamist sites?

Or that he used a medical lecture to his colleagues as an opportunity to lecture on how the Qur’an calls for decapitation of non-believers. 

Or how he was placed on probation one time for repeatedly trying to proselytise his patients and colleagues to Islam.

Or how he was on the record as stating that the war on terror was a war on Islam, and that radical Muslims in the Middle East had the “right” to stand up against aggressors (i.e. the US and her allies)?

He was moderate. He was sane. He wasn’t scary or radical. Until he ambushed 13 U.S. soldiers while shouting “Allah Akbar”.

But remember folks, aside from the “Allah Akbar” shouting and the support for suicide bombers and the apparent belief that the US was the enemy of his religion and his understanding that it’s perfectly OK to kill unbelievers because they are unbelievers, there’s no reason to rush to judgment on this matter.  I mean, who knows?  We might find out that He watched a lot of Glenn Beck and followed Sarah Palin tweets while surfing the Discovery Institute’s website, right?