Article published Saturday, November 14, 2009 Raving soldiers should face zero tolerance, like students By ROSE RUSSELL
IT SEEMS that with all the red flags indicating that something was amiss about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, somebody blew it big time.
The military and federal authorities apparently fretted about whether arresting or kicking him out of the military would be viewed as an overreaction or unfair.
With all the justifiable fuss about that, here's what I don't understand: The zero-tolerance policies used by schools to suspend children for the silliest infractions. Otherwise clear-thinking school authorities lose all common sense and suspend students for innocent acts or child's play, and police buy into this stupidity.
This week there was a report about 25 Chicago middle-school students arrested and jailed for the egregious kid prank of - get this - a food fight. Now, the parents have legal bills and students have police records for pitching cookies and fruit.
A cofounder of the charter school labeled the incident "unfortunate," and told the New York Times that, "We don't take this lightly," so police were called. Why couldn't they have made the students clean up and serve detention?
That's one example of zero-tolerance incidents in schools that are chronicled on the Rutherford Institute's Web site. And given the way schools respond to innocent pranks compared to what the military did not do about Major Hasan, maybe school and military authorities should switch places.
Here's what happened to Tawana Dawson in the Escambia County schools in Florida. The Pensacola High School student was expelled for having in school a pair of nail clippers with an attached file, which she loaned to a friend to clean her nails. Luckily, the school board had the courage to overturn her suspension, but that it even so harshly penalized her in the first place crosses the line of good sense.
In Harford County schools in Maryland, Lauren Meeks, 10, was suspended after a teacher saw her slicing an apple with a paring knife. The reporting teacher said that if she knew the child would be suspended, she wouldn't have told. The assistant principal told the teacher she would have been fired.
And what about the 9-year-old New Jersey boy's intent to shoot spitballs - I know, yuk - at a girl? He was suspended for a day and forced to endure psychological evaluation for his intentions.
That ranks with the New York third-grader who fashioned an L-shaped piece of paper to use as his "weapon" in a "cops and robbers" game. After he was arrested and charged with threatening to kill other students, he was suspended. He has been treated for post traumatic stress disorder.
Now, compare all that to Major Hasan's colleagues who were leery of him at Walter Reed Hospital. And there, during a PowerPoint presentation, he stated how tough it was becoming for "Muslims in the service to morally justify being in the military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims."
Though the war is not against Muslims, it's late for that debate with Major Hasan. What's more bothersome is that in the same presentation he stated that "We [italics mine] love death more than you love life." He also stated that Muslims should be given the option of leaving the military as "conscientious objectors" to decrease "adverse events" [again, italics mine].
Criminal suspects are innocent until proven guilty, but you draw your own conclusions as to what he meant by that. It's apparent that the major identifies with Muslim extremists.
There have been other signs, and though the FBI intercepted from 20 to 30 e-mails that he sent to a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen who is known for his anti-American teachings, authorities declared the correspondence innocent and protected by the First Amendment.
Too bad the same doesn't apply to obviously innocent American school children.
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