HARRISBURG, PA. (Catholic Online) - This weekend, the nation will honor its men and women in uniform.  There will be parades and dinners and memorial services in nearly every town in America.  Government officials will make speeches about how we honor those who have served, and those who serve today.

Sadly, for too many of those officials, the speeches are just plain lies.

If those in Washing truly honored the men and women who defend us with their lives, they would stop hiding the truth about what happened at places like Little Rock and Fort Hood.  The fact is that the military personnel who were killed and injured were the victims of self-professed jihadists.

In Little Rock, one soldier was killed and one was injured in a drive-by shooting on a military recruiting office. Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad told police that he had intended to kill as many American Army personnel as possible.  He stated that he had been sent by al-Qaeda, and that "the attack was justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic religion."  He was allowed to plead guilty, which avoided a public trial.

At Fort Hood, the gun man, Nidal Malik Hasan, reportedly shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" (God is greatest) immediately before killing 13 people and wounding 29 others.  Although Hasan was a major in the U.S. Army, his business cards did not mention his military position or rank, stating instead that he was a psychiatrist and including the title "SoA".  "SoA" is the acronym for "Soldier of Allah" commonly found on jihadist websites. After the shooting, al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahm praised the attack, called Hasan a "pioneer, a trailblazer and a role model."
 
The House of Representatives has included a provision in its recently passed National Defense Authorization Act to award Purple Hearts to the military victims of these attacks.  The Obama administration is threatening to veto the bill unless it is stripped of this provision.

The fact that this provision is necessary is, in itself, a slap at our military.  The Department of Defense has the authority to declare combat status in order to award Purple Hearts, and used that authority for the Pentagon victims of the September 11 attacks.  They have refused to do so for the victims of Little Rock and Fort Hood, instead issuing a statement that they were examining "the threat of violent Islamist extremism in the context of a broader threat of workplace violence."

It takes less than two minutes on the Internet to discover that our military are considered prime targets for terrorism, no matter where they are.  For example, Hasan's imam, al-Awlaki openly praised the Fort Hood massacre, saying, "Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done? "

That is NOT random workplace violence.  Unless the members of this administration are illiterate, they are knowingly advancing their political agenda at the expense of the safety of our troops.

So our military not only has to watch for those who shoot them from the front, they have to guard against a Commander-in-Chief who allows them to be shot in the back, and then works to cover up the truth behind each attack.

If we truly want to honor our military, let's skip the parades, and demand that the truth behind incidents like Little Rock and Fort Hood be acknowledged and acted upon.