The Left has made vigilance against jihad violence a sure-fire career killer.

Last week a Muslim employee of the Paris police, Mickael Harpon, stabbed four of his coworkers to death in the offices where he had worked for years. After initially issuing the usual claims that Harpon’s motive was unclear and that he had no connection to Islamic jihad terror, French authorities admitted that Harpon had a long track record of arousing suspicion about his jihadi sentiments. But nothing was done. And the fault of that lies squarely at the feet of the Left.

French President Emmanuel Macron said that it was “inconceivable and unacceptable” that Harpon was able to perpetrate a jihad massacre “in the very place where we pursue terrorists and criminals.” But it wasn’t really inconceivable at all, and in modern-day France, after Macron and his colleagues finish thundering their denunciations, such attacks are unlikely to remain in any genuine sense unacceptable.

How was this able to happen in the very place you supposedly pursue terrorists and criminals, Mr. Macron? The answer is all too simple. According to French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, Harpon “had caused alarm among his colleagues as far back as 2015, when he defended the massacre of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper by two brothers vowing allegiance to al-Qaeda.” What’s more, Harpon “had begun wearing traditional Islamic garments for mosque visits, and had started refusing ‘certain kinds of contact with women.’”

Yet “even though a police official charged with investigating suspected radicalization among the force questioned the colleagues, none of them wanted to file an official complaint.”

The fall guy in this scenario is shaping up to be Castaner, who “will face questioning by parliament’s intelligence commission Tuesday over the attack.” But it isn’t Castaner’s fault by any stretch of the imagination. He isn’t remotely responsible for the prevailing culture of the Paris police force that led all of Harpon’s colleagues to decline to file a complaint against him.

No, the responsibility for that culture lies solely with the Left – and of course the Macron government is Leftist. In France as in the United States today, if you utter the slightest word against Islamic jihad violence or any suspicion of any individual Muslim, you’ll be fired and publicly defamed as an “Islamophobe,” a “racist,” and a “bigot.” You’ll be so stigmatized that you won’t be able to find another job, and if you do, your accusers will pursue you and get you fired from it as well. You’ll be accused of “hate” and of spreading “conspiracy theories.”

The French officials who heard Harpon knew that if they filed a complaint against him, they would be committing career suicide. So they kept silent.

This is not the first time this has happened. The same scenario played out in the United States, in the case of Fort Hood jihad murderer, Nidal Malik Hasan. Hasan, at the time a major in the U.S. Army, murdered thirteen people and wounded thirty at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, in the name of Islam and jihad. He did this despite the fact that his “extremism” was on abundant display for years before he opened fire at Fort Hood. Hasan had for a considerable time raised eyebrows with his statements about his own allegiances, routinely harassing his colleagues with harangues about Islam, and proclaiming that he was “Muslim first and American second.” He even told his colleagues that Infidels should have their throats cut, in accord with the Qur’an (47:4). His business card read “SOA,” a well-known acronym among jihadists for “Soldier of Allah.”

In June 2007, Hasan gave a PowerPoint presentation to his coworkers, in which he proposed to show “what the Qur’an inculcates in the minds of Muslims and the potential implications this may have for the U.S. military.” He said, “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”

An official who spoke to some of those who attended recounted that “Hasan apparently gave a long lecture on the Qur’an and talked about how if you don’t believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You’re set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat.” According to AP, “he gave a class presentation questioning whether the U.S.-led war on terror was actually a war on Islam. And students said he suggested that Shariah, or Islamic law, trumped the Constitution and he attempted to justify suicide bombings.”

In it, Hasan argued that Muslims must not fight against other Muslims (as is mandated by Qur’an 4:92), and that the Qur’an also mandates both defensive and offensive jihad against unbelievers (by implication including the United States itself, as the world’s foremost infidel polity), in order to impose upon those unbelievers the hegemony of Islamic law. He quoted the Qur’anic verse calling for war against the “People of the Book” (that is, mainly Jews and Christians) until they “pay the tax in acknowledgment of [Islamic] superiority and they are in a state of subjection” (9:29). Hasan seems then to have been telling the assembled (and no doubt stunned) physicians, who had been expecting a lecture about psychiatry, that Muslims had a religious obligation to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as inferiors under their rule. His clear implication was that Americans were included in this.

Although his jihadist tendencies were well known, clearly fear of charges of “Islamophobia” prevented his Army superiors from acting upon signs of his incipient jihadist tendencies. Instead, they kept promoting him. AP reported in January 2010 that “a Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan’s medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.”

And so Hasan rose through Army ranks even as he justified suicide bombing and spouted hatred for America while wearing its uniform, and he did so with extraordinarily positive recommendations. In an evaluation dated March 13, 2009, just short of eight months before his jihad attack, Hasan’s superiors wrote that he displayed “outstanding moral integrity” and praised his project topic for his master’s of public health degree: “the impact of beliefs and culture on views regarding military service during the Global War on Terror.” They even praised him specifically as a Muslim, in passages that their authors must have remembered with stinging regret after his jihad murders: one said that he should be put into a position “that allows others to learn from his perspectives” and declared that his “unique insights into the dimensions of Islam” and his “moral reasoning” could be of “great potential interest and strategic importance to the U.S. Army.”

A July 1, 2009 report went even farther, saying that Hasan had “a keen interest in Islamic culture and faith and has shown capacity to contribute to our psychological understanding of Islamic nationalism and how it may relate to events of national security and Army interest in the Middle East and Asia.” Among his “unique skills” were listed “Islamic studies” and “traumatic stress spectrum psychiatric disorders.” The report concluded that “Maj. Hasan has great potential as an Army officer.” His murders were four months away.

Even while writing these effusive recommendations, Hasan’s superiors and those around him were aware of his pro-jihad statements, and were worried about them. “Yet no one in Hasan’s chain of command,” reports AP, “appears to have challenged his eligibility to hold a secret security clearance even though they could have because the statements raised doubt about his loyalty to the United States.”

Our politically correct fantasies about Islam and jihad have a price. Thirteen people paid it in Fort Hood in 2009. Four more people paid it in Paris last week. There will be many, many more.