American Casualties of Jihad in the U.S. Homeland Should be Awarded Purple Hearts

     Some members of Congress have proposed that United States servicemen who were killed or wounded in jihadist attacks by militant Islamists in the American homeland should be awarded Purple Heart medals as casualties in the War on Terrorism. The medal is given to casualties of hostile action, including “terrorist attacks.” The Obama Administration opposes the proposal. 

     President Barak Obama has declined to award the soldiers Purple Hearts because, for political reasons, the Administration does not want to acknowledge the incidents as hostile action by the enemy, either as acts of terrorism or even as acts of jihad, as if the murders were workplace incidents. 

     Specifically, the incidents in question are the Ft. Hood, Texas massacre that killed twelve servicemen and one civilian and wounded 30 other American servicemen and civilians and the killing of a servicemen and wounding of another in Arkansas at a military recruiting station. Both attacks were in 2009 and were carried out by Islamists who admitted to have been motivated by jihad, Islamic holy war. 

     As I have posted several times, terrorism is the targeting of violence against innocent civilians in order to intimidate the populace into giving into the demands of the terrorists. Therefore, attacks against the military are not “terrorist attacks.” They are, however, hostile action in the War on Terrorism because they are militant acts of war by the same enemy as the terrorists and motivated by exactly the same ideology of Islamism, i.e. militant Islam that wages violent, aggressive jihad against “infidels” in order to make them submit. The War on Terrorism is a war not only on the tactic of terrorism employed by the Islamists, but on the Islamism that motivates it. It does not matter whether or not the perpetrators are American citizens or were working with foreign terrorist organizations. The perpetrator of the Ft. Hood massacre was motivated by the leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen, but it does not matter where geographically the source of his Islamist beliefs came. Thus, the distinction about whether or not these acts were “terrorist” is irrelevant. A jihadist is an enemy in the War on Terrorism when he engages in hostile action against American soldiers, which meets the definition for the awarding of the Purple Hearts to the casualties of his attacks. These soldiers in Ft. Hood and Arkansas were killed or wounded in the War on Terrorism. Indeed, some of the Ft. Hood victims were targeted by the jihadist because they were about to deploy overseas in the War.

     The Obama Administration is unwilling to identify the enemy as militant Islamists because it is afraid of blaming a religious motivation for violent jihad. Because the Administration’s position is that Islam itself is not the ideological source of terrorism, it is unable or unwilling to ascribe Islamism as the source, despite militant Islam’s obvious religious origin. The Administration and its liberal supporters maintain that Islamism is an Islamic heresy, as if the Obama Administration is the human authority for what is the true interpretation of Islam, which ignores the self-described Islamic orthodoxy of Islamists. The Administration and its liberal supporters do not recognize that it does not matter whether or not Islamism represents true Islam, but only that Islamism comes from Islam. Therefore, the Administration is incapable of differentiating between Islam in general and Islamism in particular, and between Islamic jihad that is purely spiritual and peaceful and that which is violent. It has thus gone to such a degree as falsely to deny any religious motivation whatsoever for admitted acts of jihad and, as a result, to decline the proper awarding of Purple Hearts to its victims, as if the Obama Administration has the power to deny the truth and rewrite history.

     The Obama Administration’s failure to identify the enemy and his motivations makes victory in the War more difficult to achieve because it is impossible to defeat an enemy that cannot be distinguished, as I have noted repeatedly.

     Conservatives should continue to call upon Congress to pass a bill to award Purple hearts to the casualties of these attacks by the militant Islamist enemy in the War on Terrorism in the American homeland.