Stop Making Excuses for Hasan

Commentators are working overtime to explain away the Fort Hood shootings as a personal breakdown rather than what it obviously was, three conservative columnists argue today: a terrorist assault by an Islamic extremist.

• The explanation for Major Hasan's actions should be crystal clear to anybody not afraid of offending Muslim sensibilities, Dorothy Rabinowitz argues in the Wall Street Journal. "It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments."

• The "national rush to therapy," the effort to portray Hasan as "a disturbed individual under a lot of stress," rather than Muslim militant in the US military ranks, is understandable but patronizing, David Brooks writes at the New York Times. "If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage."

• There's a real problem when the media "is eager to jump to the conclusion that peaceful political opponents are in league with violent extremists, but is terrified to consider the possibility that violent extremists really are violent extremists if doing so means calling attention to the fact that they are Muslims," argues Jonah Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times.

(More Dr Phil stories.)