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The meme had been brewing for a few days among some of the Fox News guests -- particularly Michelle Malkin -- brought on to talk about the Fort Hood shootings, but it was Bill Sammon, during the broadcast of the memorial for the slain soldiers, who apparently made it official at Fox: The Fort Hood shootings were a terrorist attack -- comparable to 9/11 and Oklahoma City -- by a radical Islamist engaged in Muslim "jihad."

Now, it's not only the conventional wisdom at Fox News, it's one of their major attack points -- they're claiming that because President Obama and the rest of the media aren't adopting their presumptuous and hysterical meme, they're being "soft" on terrorism.

The meme gained momentum when Glenn picked up Sammon's ball and ran with it the next day, declaring: "If you don't call [Hasan] a terrorist, it clears a path for ... an extremist terrorist plan." That night, Sean Hannity explored the question at length with Michelle Malkin, as you can see from the video atop this post.

For Malkin and Hannity, "political correctness" -- which they blame for the military's failure to stop Hasan -- is actually code for "the refusal to engage in ethnic and religious profiling". Because such profiling, it's clear, is what they think the military (and the government generally) should do to prevent future such shootings.

The worst offender, though, has been Bill O'Reilly, who -- as you can see below -- not only harangued Sally Quinn for her reluctance to declare Nidal Hasan a "terrorist," but then devoted his leadoff Talking Points Memo segment last night to chastising the president and the rest of the media for their reluctance to embrace the meme.

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This exchange with Quinn was especially revealing:

O'Reilly: But you have a hard time saying the words "Muslim terrorist," and so does Obama. He has a hard time saying it. I don't know why you guys aren't saying it. You know, why, why?

Quinn: Well, I think, first of all, there are different kinds of terrorists. As I said, Timothy McVeigh --

O'Reilly: He's a Muslim terrorist! What do you mean, different kinds of terrorist? He killed people under the banner of jihad! That's who he is! What do you -- look, what do you want, him to come to your house with a strap-on bomb? The guy did it for jihadist reasons! "Allah Akbar!" That's the slogan! He mails Al Qaeda! Miss Quinn, you're a brilliant woman, and I'm not saying that facetiously. You are. A third-grader gets this, and you're resisting it! I wanna know why!

Quinn: Bill, you're making a very good case. I mean, he's Muslim, and he may well end up being a terrorist. We don't know for sure --

O'Reilly: I know for sure! Ninety percent of the people watching me know for sure! I don't know why you don't know for sure! What else do you need?

Quinn: I mean, you can call the guy who blew up -- you know, who shot up the Holocaust Museum a terrorist --

O'Reilly: Did he yell "Allah Akbar?" If he yelled "Allah Akbar," and he e-mailed Al Qaeda in Yemen, I'd call him that, Miss Quinn!

Quinn: OK, he's a Muslim terrorist.

O'Reilly: Thank you.

O'Reilly seems to have a peculiar idea of what constitutes "terrorism." His definition of the word seems to be "any act of violence by devout Muslims", or something along those lines.

That, of course, is quite a distance from the the legal definition of terrorism (from U.S. Code Title 22, Ch.38, Para. 2656f(d)):

(2) the term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents;

This term, in fact, perfectly describes Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn, who was, beyond any serious doubt, a classic right-wing "lone wolf" terrorist.

It is in fact still not clear, however, whether the description fits Nidal Hasan's motives in shooting 13 people to death. It is true that all kinds of evidence is emerging showing that Hasan was increasingly becoming politically radicalized.

What that evidence doesn't establish, though, is that he engaged in this horrendous act on behalf of those radical beliefs, or whether those beliefs simply formed part of the context in which he acted. There certainly haven't been any organizational ties established. We probably won't have any idea until Hasan himself starts talking, or at least his attorneys begin preparing his defense.

It's important to remember what mass-murder profiler Pat Brown told Fox's Brian Kilmeade:

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Right wingers have been doing their damnedest since the Fort Hood shootings last week to use them as an excuse to attack Muslims and generally do their favorite schtick, aka fearmongering.

Yesterday, during the Fox News broadcast of the memorial service for the victims at Fort Hood, Fox contributor Bill Sammon took this the next step: He began openly referring to the Fort Hood case as a "terrorist attack" and actually compared it to Oklahoma City and 9/11:

Sammon: I think it's really going to be key to see the tone and tenor of the Commander in Chief when he addresses this crowd. Because it's actually a very important moment in his presidency.

Think about this. This is the first time that he's going to be responding in a major way to, really the first major act of terrorism against the United States on our soil. And there's some similarities and some analogies to when President Clinton addressed the nation after Oklahoma City, to when George W. Bush went to address the nation from Ground Zero -- both of those times, just like this, were early on in the presidencies, and really, in those earlier two examples, to some extent, they were, uh, forums in which the presidents sort of found their voices, especially if you think about Ground Zero, where President Bush had trouble sort of presenting a real strong, uh, public face for the first couple of days, and then he went to Ground Zero and said, 'I can hear you, and pretty soon the people here are going to hear from all of us.'

So it's an important moment when a president addresses the nation in the wake of a terrorist act against U.S. interests.

Throughout the day Fox was running a logo calling the event "Attack on Fort Hood," and featuring investigative reports suggesting that the shooter, Nidal Hasan, was acting at the bidding of radical imams -- even though none of the evidence so far actually concretely shows that Hasan was acting as an Islamic terrorist.

Indeed, most of the evidence so far seems to indicate this was a militarized case of "going postal" -- which is always a horrific thing, but lacks the political/ideological component that always defines real acts of terrorism.

President Obama, in fact, has been urging the public not to leap to unwarranted conclusions about the shooter's motives. Looks like Fox News and Bill Sammon have decided to just ignore that advice. After all, they have an agenda to push.

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From This Week with George Stephanopoulos, an interview with Gen. George Casey in which (of course) we use the "terrorism" label, but the general also worries that speculation about the Ft. Hood shootings will fan the fires of bigotry in the military:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say you can't talk too much about the investigation, but we are learning a fair amount about Major Hasan in the last couple of days. And it appears that there were several warning signs they either could have or should have been caught.

His fellow students and here in Bethesda, Maryland, say that he had anti-American rants at various presentations. The FBI has found some Internet postings by a man with Mr. Hasan's name, very inflammatory, praising suicide bombers.

And one of the major's fellow students has been especially concerned by what he said. He said that it was very clear to him, and his name is

Val Finnell, that -- and that he had complained to administrators at a military university about these anti-American rants. And the AP story that quotes him goes on to say that Hasan's fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan's anti-American propaganda, but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept off the students from filing a formal complaint. Is that true?

CASEY: I think we need to be very careful here about speculating based on anecdotes like that. We are encouraging all of our soldiers and leaders that may have information pertaining to the suspect to come forward with that information to the criminal investigation division and to the FBI. So, I realize there is a lot out there. We all want to know what happened and what motivated the suspect, but I think we need to be very, very careful here in these early days to let the investigation take its course. These are professionals and they will sort through this.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So it's fair to say that right now, you can't rule out anything. We don't know if this was an act of premeditated political terror, or if this was a case of someone who just snapped.

CASEY: I think you are exactly right, and I don't think we should speculate on one or the other or any other possibilities.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the things this does raise, though, is the special challenge paused to all of you by Muslims in the military.

There are only about 3,000 Muslims in the military right now, and on the one hand, you want to recruit Muslims. There is a great need for Muslims in the military right now. On the other hand, this is not the first case we've seen of fratricide by someone with a Muslim background in the military. How do you deal with this challenge?

CASEY: Again, I think that's something else we need to be very careful about, and I think the speculation could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here. And it's not just about Muslims. We have a very diverse army. We have a very diverse society.

And that gives us all strength. So again, we need to be very careful with that.

Since we're already seen so much innuendo and the "how do we know whether this guy was a terrorist?" routine from the "get it quickly if not accurately" television news, I thought readers would be interested in a more human slant on the Ft. Hood tragedy:

Reporting from Al Birah, West Bank - When Rafik Ismail Hamad last traveled from the West Bank to visit relatives in America, he was struck by the pressures one of his nephews was facing.

The younger man, an American-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, spoke to his uncle of ethnic taunts by army colleagues. He was haunted by the wartime disabilities of soldiers he treated as an army psychiatrist, Hamad recalled, and was overwhelmed by a growing caseload he felt unable to manage.

On top of that, the uncle said, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had drifted apart from his family; he was a sensitive, solitary man bearing his burdens alone.

Late Thursday, Hamad was home in the West Bank town of Al Birah when he heard the news on television: A shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, had left 13 people dead, and Maj. Hasan, wounded and in a coma, was being accused of the killings.

"The whole family is in a state of denial," Hamad said today. "We don't believe he is capable of doing something like that. I was amazed and shocked, because it's not him. He's very quiet, gentle."

"Maybe it built up together -- the harassment, too many patients, the workload, the tragedies his patients brought to him," said the 65-year-old retired real estate broker. "Whatever it was, it must have been big pressure, something terrible he couldn't handle."

[...] Hamad described his nephew as a gentle soul who once, as a young adult, mourned for three months after rolling over during a nap and crushing his pet parakeet. During medical school, the uncle said, Hasan switched his major to psychiatry after fainting at the sight of blood while delivering a baby.

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