“Seeing the Fort Hood shooting as an act of Islamist terrorism is the first step toward seeing how misguided a hawkish approach to fighting terrorism has been,” argues Robert Wright in a New York Times op-ed.
“Seeing the Fort Hood shooting as an act of Islamist terrorism is the first step toward seeing how misguided a hawkish approach to fighting terrorism has been,” argues Robert Wright in a New York Times op-ed.
In the rhetoric I’ve heard since the Fort Hood massacre, some right-of-center media figures are drawing a direct connection to the debate over the PATRIOT Act. We have criticized the Chinese for their censorship of the Internet, but in the wake of Maj. Hasan’s “self-radicalization,” it sounds as though similar measures may be proposed here, to some extent.
Daniel Henninger in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal: Hasan was “radicalized by spending vast amounts of time viewing violent Islamic Web sites run from abroad…. If you sit in the United States and watch this stuff ’round the clock—self-brainwashing—it is fully protected activity. It qualifies as ’speech,’ protected by the panoply of First Amendment law. These protections exist nowhere else in the world.”
“The argument is that the Army should have mustered him out of the service and thereby avoided the 13 murders. Really? After kicking him out of the Army, there was no probable cause for authorities to surveil a civilian Nidal Hasan. In time he as easily could have killed 13 Americans in a suburban Texas mall.”
“Future Hasans can get jacked up all day on kill-the-Americans Web sites, and we have to wait until they put in motion a conspiracy…. Or until they start shooting.”
“This is what the political fight was through the Bush years…. The Democrats have cast their lot with tighter restrictions. The past six years and a presidential campaign proved that. In the wake of Hasan’s 13 dead people, revisiting the limits of our vulnerability has to be on the table in next year’s congressional elections, and then a presidential election.”
It sounds as though we’re sure to be hearing more about this….
In 2004, Robert Kaplan was “embedded” with a Marine battalion in Iraq. “The battalion just happened to have in the ranks a corporal of Syrian descent who did double duty as the commander’s translator for his meetings with the Iraqis. The young Muslim corporal was arguably the most valuable member of the battalion: simply by his presence he was able to cast the battalion in a different, more positive light among the locals.”
Continues Kaplan: “The United States military needs more troops of Muslim origin within its ranks…. Numerous frustrated voices declare that we shouldn’t be shy about declaring that this attack was an incident of Islamic terrorism. That it may well turn out to be, but we would lose far more than we would gain by waving the bloody shirt…. The consequences for terrorists must be tough, but our rhetoric must remain ecumenical. We should let the investigation take its course, mete out punishment, and quickly move on.”
David Swerdlick at The Root: “Cynics like the New York Post’s Michelle Malkin have been quick to attach tough-sounding terms like ‘terrorism’ and ‘jihad’ to Ft. Hood. But heinous as Hasan’s alleged actions were, it’s unclear what ‘goal’ he had. Malkin claims any nuance is ‘a rush to whitewash.’ Actually, hers is a rush to make Ft. Hood a proxy fight about ‘political correctness’—it says more about her patriotically correct agenda than it does about what underlies the tragedy.”
Scott Shane and James Dao in the New York Times: “Some experts on terrorism say Major [Nidal] Hasan may be the latest example of an increasingly common type of terrorist, one who has been self-radicalized with the help of the Internet and who wreaks havoc without support from overseas networks and without having to cross a border to reach his target.”
“What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center,” begins Nancy Gibbs’ report in Time.
I don’t know how much turns on the question of whether we define Hasan’s actions as “terrorism.” Gibbs: “If ‘leaderless resistance’ is the wave of the future, it may be less lethal but harder to fight; there are fewer clues to collect and less chatter to hear, even as information about means and methods is so much more widely dispersed.”
The London Economist considers Maj. Hasan to exemplify “psychotic jihadism.” “Most Americans seem to be perfectly capable of understanding that deranged, isolated extremists do not act on behalf of the whole religion, just as most understand the difference between people who oppose abortion and people who attack abortion clinics. And Major Hasan does appear to be in the deranged category. The details of his life that have emerged so far suggest a lonely, loveless and circumscribed existence: no wife, no close friends, a cheap apartment. There was no significant backlash against Muslims after the September 11th attacks, and Major Hasan, unlike the hijackers, can expect a trial and, if convicted, the death penalty.”
The Washington Post’s “On Faith” feature discusses the problems faced by Muslims in the U. S. military. The report mentions remarks offered by Pat Robertson on his Monday night telecast: “Islam is a violent — I was going to say religion — but it’s not a religion. It’s a political system. It’s a violent political system bent on the overthrow of governments of the world and world domination.”
Robertson knows that George W. Bush and John McCain would not want him to say such things. Furthermore, we never heard such things about Islam before September 11, 2001. Before that — well, the people we now refer to as the Taliban, once were known as the Mujahedin. They were the heroes of the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (These statements are subject to considerable interpretation and may not go unchallenged, I am sure.) There was King Hussein of Jordan, a long-standing friend of the United States. You can even watch this video of a prominent American official shaking hands with the notorious head of a predominantly Muslim state — albeit with a secular government at the time — in 1983.
Some months ago I had occasion to attend a lecture and multimedia presentation about the “Muslim agenda for America” — in the meeting hall of a church, the sort of church the halls of which I rarely darken. It has to be said that the individual giving the presentation had converted from Islam to Christianity — and subsequently his siblings had attempted to have him murdered. He then emigrated from his native country to America. He therefore was well acquainted with the darker side of the faith into which he had been born.
The presentation eventually reached the matter of what American Christians ought to do upon encountering Muslim immigrants. The answer, of course, was that Christians ought to be friendly and hospitable — but apparently this hospitality was to consist largely of an attempt to convert the Muslims. What was to be done if the Muslims were unwilling to convert — as most people, having been born into whatever faith they practice, would not be — was left unstated. The presentation moved on to a lurid account of Muslim efforts to win converts in America. At the same time, euphoric atmospherics accompanied news of the successful Christian evangelism in the Muslim world, even in countries as hostile as Iran.
The whole affair left me considerably agitated and upset. Those who need to be exposed to objections to it probably never will encounter such a thing, since they may inhibit a sealed-off media world consisting of their churches, evangelical Christian radio and other media, and such outlets as Fox News.
At a mosque somewhere in Teheran, is there an imam presenting a lurid lecture and multimedia presentation on “the Christian agenda for Iran”? Just asking….
Did Maj. Hasan suffer a “personal meltdown,” or was he “a homegrown Islamic terrorist”? Argues Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle (at Real Clear Politics): “In the end, it may turn out that both views are correct — in that Hasan would not be the first unstable person to immerse himself in an extremist ideology before he turned his rage on his fellow man. Perhaps that is how seemingly benign men become terrorists.”
I think she’s got it about right, based on what I can see from the same media reports everyone else is seeing. Nevertheless, non-liberals detected a reticence to acknowledge Hasan’s religion in “mainstream” media (”MSM”) coverage. Notes Saunders: “I watched the story as it broke Thursday, and I understand why news anchors hesitated before coming to conclusions on the shooting. After all, early reports got it wrong — it was reported Hasan was dead.”
The commentariat is awash with condemnations of excessive “correctness” in the wake of the massacre. As much is reflected in Saunders’ remark: “If the Fort Hood shooter had been a white man who yelled the N-word before firing, I don’t think you would see military brass warning against a rush to judgment that the shooter was a racist.” Indeed, liberals’ first instinct in such a situation is to adopt a defensive pose against anti-Muslim innuendo and reprisals. Saunders notes that the Army Chief of Staff has warned against jumping to conclusions. “That’s his job; he must work to prevent a backlash against Muslims serving their country in the military, often at great personal sacrifice. Let me add that to view all Muslim troops as suspect — or otherwise attempt to isolate them — would be to reward Hasan’s attack.” It is to be hoped that everyone can agree with that last statement.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, violent reprisals against American Muslims were anticipated in some circles. By and large, such fears were not realized, although I am sure some incidents took place. That lack of reprisal redounded to the country’s credit — but, to that end, it had to be mentioned in public that Americans ought not to retaliate against their innocent Muslim neighbors. Any such statement carries overtones of “political correctness,” which annoys American whites — and, since most of the electorate is still “palefaced,” I tend to look askance at commentators who insist on playing with a stacked deck in this respect.
Nevertheless, few Americans are disposed to feelings of charity or forgiveness toward Maj. Hasan, who lives in a military hospital in San Antonio, federal investigators undoubtedly near his door. What took place inside his cranium remained something of a mystery. In any case, if it was out of excessive “correctness” that responsible authorities looked the other way at the red flags that, if media reports are accurate, would seem to have been cause for considerable alarm, we may hope that heads will roll….
Tunku Varadarajan at the Forbes website, on the Fort Hood shootings.