Ft Hood Update: Purple Hearts for the Fallen After All?

This is an issue that I feel quite strongly about for a variety of reasons. So I was very glad to see Diana West writing on it. It is important at so many levels that people, especially military personnel who are killed by jihadis whether it is on US soil or not, but perhaps especially if it is on US soil, receive the Purple Heart medal. To not do so, victimizes these brave men and women a second time. People who already were willing to risk their lives for the defence of their nation, are buried or injured without even acknowledgement of their circumstance. And why? Is it to avoid offending the enemy? Perhaps much worse than that, is to avoid actually even naming the enemy for fear both of some kind of backlash against Islam and its never ending demands for the transformation of Western civilization to accommodate their choice of beliefs, and perhaps to avoid empowering them in some way. Once we admit who they are, we have to pay attention to them.

Taxonomy, I have always felt, has potential for tremendous evil. It would appear much of the current US and Western nations policy concerning a very real and multilateral threat from Islam is taxonomic in nature. Simply categorize it the way you want and hey presto, it isn’t a problem. Except when they kill everyone all over the place and change all your laws, customs, and freedoms.

Eeyore for Vlad

Purple Heart for Private Long please.

Written by: Diana West

A positive development in the quest for recognition that Hasan’s jihad on Ft. Hood was an act of war: US Rep. John Carter, the Republican who represents the Texas district that includes Ft. Hood, is introducing a bill to grant combatant status to those killed and wounded by Hasan (“allegedly”) on Nov. 5.

Pvt. William Long, killed by an avowed jihadist outside a Little Rock Army-Navy recruiting station, and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, wounded,  deserve to be on that list as well.

But Carter’s bill is the correct first step. Whether the bill passes in a Democrat-controlled Congress is the question. And whether it is debated fully to take in a free-speaking discussion of jihad, Islamic ideology and, Exhibit A, Hasan’s Islamically correct slide show, is the question, too.

From today’s Austin American-Statesman:

U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock, will introduce a bill today that would grant combatant status for victims of the Nov. 5 shootings at Fort Hood.

“The attack on Fort Hood was a planned terrorist attack, the same as the attacks against our forces overseas,” Carter said in a news release Monday. “Our wounded and the families of those who lost their lives should receive the same treatment, recognition and benefits as if the attack occurred on a U.S. military installation in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Carter’s district includes Fort Hood.

If granted this distinction, victims’ families would be eligible for greater compensation. The families of soldiers killed in the shooting would receive the maximum life insurance benefit, and permanently disabled victims would receive more disability payments. Currently, families of the soldiers killed are to receive a $100,000 tax-free death gratuity, according to an Army spokesman at Fort Hood.

In addition, military victims would be eligible for the Purple Heart under the bill, and civilians injured or killed could receive its civilian equivalent, the Secretary of Defense Medal for the Defense of Freedom, which was established by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2001 to honor the victims of the attacks on the Pentagon. The medal is usually given to Department of Defense employees, but the secretary of defense has the authority to bestow it upon any civilian killed or injured defending the country.

Carter spokesman John Stone said the congressman hopes the measure passes quickly.

“We anticipate this will be a noncontroversial bill, and we may be able to convince the committee chairmen to expedite the process,” Stone said.

Non-controversial? I hope he’s right.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

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