Posted on 11/06/2009 9:36:18 AM PST by Mount Athos
Thirteen dead and 31 wounded would be a bad day for the US military in Afghanistan, and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a “tragedy” (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the “war on terror”. Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy – a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.
And he’s a US Army major.
And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity – as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (ie, his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.
When it emerged early on Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: “Please judge Major Malik Nadal [sic] by his actions and not by his name.”
Concerned tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that – and not just in the sense that The New York Times’ first report on Major Hasan never mentioned the words “Muslim” or “Islam”, or that ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s only observation on his name was that “as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer’s wife told me, ‘I wish his name was Smith.’”
What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man.
Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions – flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own – taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn.
But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism”. But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam.
Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An army psychiatrist, Major Hasan was an American, born and raised, who graduated from Viriginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, which works out to the best part of half-a-million dollars’ worth of elite education. But he opposed America’s actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and made approving remarks about jihadists on American soil. “You need to lock it up, Major,” cautioned his superior officer, Colonel Terry Lee.
But he didn’t really need to “lock it up” at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if any “red flags” were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of people are “anti-war”. Some of them are objectively on the other side – that’s to say, they encourage and support attacks on American troops and civilians. But not many of those in that latter category are US Army majors. Or so one would hope. Yet why be surprised? Azad Ali, a man who approvingly quotes such observations as “If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation” is an advisor to Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent of the US attorneys). In Toronto this week, the brave ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish mentioned en passant that, on flying from the US to Canada, she was questioned at length about the purpose of her visit by an apparently Muslim border official. When she revealed that she was giving a speech about Islamic law, he rebuked her: “We are not to question Sharia.”
That’s the guy manning the airport security desk. In The New York Times, Maria Newman touched on Hasan’s faith only obliquely: “He was single, according to the records, and he listed no religious preference.” Thank goodness for that, eh? A neighbor in Texas says the major had “Allah” and “another word” pinned up in Arabic on his door. “Akbar” maybe? On Thursday morning he is said to have passed out copies of the Koran to his neighbors. He shouted in Arabic as he fired.
But don’t worry: As the FBI spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there’s no terrorism angle.
That’s true, in a very narrow sense: Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaeda reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier. But the same pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline – his entire American identity. One might say the same about Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale, Arizona, arrested last week after fatally running over his “too westernized” daughter Noor in the latest American honor killing. Or the two US residents – one American, one Canadian – arrested a few days earlier for plotting to fly to Denmark for the purposes of murdering the editor who commissioned the famous Mohammed cartoons. But Noor Almaleki’s brother shrugs that’s just the way it is. ““One thing to one culture doesn’t make sense to another culture,” he says.
Indeed. To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don’t hold your breath. We’d rather talk about anything else – even in the army.
What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy – in Afghanistan and in Texas.
A couple of years ago I was banned from this board for 6 months for suggesting exactly that action. Apparently it’s not a good thing to be right...too early.
Officer Munley is a great American hero! As Rhett Butler would say “what a woman!”
That's the problem with the self-important, overly sensitive censorship around here: It prevents a lot of necessary information and opinion from coming out in a timely fashion.
C'est la vie.
Nailed it.
I’m going to side with Ronald Reagan and Tony Snow on this one.
They both believed in the goodness of the American people, and believed that given enough time and freedom they would come to the right conlusions and d the right thing.
Anyone who is not an ideolgue now realizes that the MSM is leftist.
My wife, who is apolitical, was watching Good Morning America’s coverage of the shooting. Even she noted that “It sure is funny that they don’t mention that this guy is a Muslim”.
I personally think this is a Katrina moment for Obama and the Left. People really are noticing.
I agree. The MSM has adopted what I like to call the ABC religion: “Anything But Christ.”
Only Christian culture has defeated them in the past.
Nevermind the fact the he lived in America his entire life, nevermind that he served in the military, nevermind that he was a psychiatrist. How many troops have been offing themselves lately? Nevermind that. How many come back scared for life, oh nevermind that! Nevermind that congress never declared war with anyone! Nevermind all check and balances, nevermind that the federal reserve will drain your lifeblood out of you! Nevermind that more children drown in their own pools every year than are attacked by terrorists, nevermind that more people die of the ordinary flu than have died from the spooky “swine” flu. Nevermind that 50 million have died in the last 300 days 5,000 being from swine flu. Nevermind what I say cause Obama loves you and wants to save you by jailing you if you don’t love his healthcare. Islam smizlam woopidie doo! OHHHHHHH I’m so scared of some pathetic loser that probably has more in common with Hannibal Lecter meets Shazam! Some goofball arab kills some people and everyone craps their pants and runs for there mommies, where are your backbones? Islam maybe just a bunch of dumb fools, a bunch of “faith” based charities. Faith was what killed those people on the base not Islam alone, faith in anything with 100% certainty or the fear that it doesn’t exist.
Obama says don’t jump to conclusions? I’ll show you conclusions, you assume you just gun people down in their homes in their countries and you don’t expect blowback? Plus nobody asks the troops how they feel about looking for imaginary WMD, nobody asks them how they feel about protecting the faith based “western civilization”, nobody seems to think it matters, all that matters maybe what Obamabots and Bushbots think and say. I’m so sick of these empty suites that seek to make names for themselves through the spilling of the blood of people that they do not care a bit about at all. They have power they print money, they don’t care for you, yet many still serve them and go along with the scam, If only 5 percent of you woke up to the fraud the capitalist system wouldn’t be grinding to a halt, healthcare wouldn’t be rammed down our throats, etc. Instead we had to endure Skull and BOnesmen and MCcain, the man whom was kicked to the back of the bus for the Bush family, whom none of these wealthy liberals are even remotely conservative.
Watch out for the Islam boogyman he gonna git ya! Come on people this guy was a cosmic schmuck that did this he could have been a seventh day adventist and he still would have been a loser. All I can hear maybe Obama saying I wish it were “mcveigh jr” instead!
Oh yeah nevermind the MIAC report that says anyone that doesn’t want forced healthcare must be involved in some terrorist activity or that Ron PAul supporters are secretly racists or that Arabs are not the threat just soldiers involved in the war efforts. This guy fits MIAC only thing the morons that wrote forgot to mention what kinds of people other than libertarians! You see it always has to do with branding real conservatives as the bad guy and branding the liberals in both parties as the enlightened icons of “western civilization”. Multiculturalists are a fraud and a distraction, the very notion of “western civ” implies some sort of multicultural enlightenment!
bumping for later comment
Nevermind paragraphs. Idiot. Commie douchebag.
Nevermind that suicide rates among returning vets are lower than in the general population. You're such a moron.
Your projecting...I see! Every critter fer himself! Survival of the fittest baby!
You have a point!
Get lost, dirtbag. Go take your lithium and take a nap.
You appear as the cause of fanaticism, stop patting yourself on the back!
And you’re a looney tune.
Me thinks you protest too much, go crawl back into your corner and “suffer”, as you assume everyone else must join you, no thanks bud!
What is this WE BS? Are you for real? He is a muslim! He wasn't ignorant, he wanted to kill Americans. Are you really so clueless? You want to claim a part of making him fine, speak for yourself. You certainly can have all credit for making this madman as nobody else wants to claim him. Maybe some sea kelp would be good for your brain.
ps spellcheck is your friend!
If we programmed this guy to kill, what maybe so shocking...it appears not like he blew up a building with a bunch of sick kids in it from a airplane. OR cut off sanitation supplies so half a million died from preventable disease or tried to poison the Afghans...if I recall that was an option after 911, genocide cause somebody killed 3,000 seems like crushing an ant with a sledgehammer, just because you can do it doesn't mean it makes any sense. Yeah I can go in my backyard and get out a blowtorch and go around and roast ants until the sun goes down...but why bother I have better things to do than waste my time worrying about some insignificant threat.
A crazy ape shoots some people up at Ft.Hood then everyone says...why I'm not an ape, I'm special not like that ape, I am superior to him, nobody I have ever known has gone crazy and hurt somebody...I have never had feelings of anger, etc.
You are not that separate, you may want us to kill muslims, etc. You have a sense of revenge for some jerk that killed a bunch of people that were not like him....fine go find a place where nobody else maybe like you and make equal justice if you are so bad with your sea kelp, put your actions where your words are and do something about it. It will not matter, you're just wasting your time ....we all are gonna die someday, no sense in giving yourself anxiety about the reality it will happen soon enough, no sense in hurrying around unless you are in a hurry to get there.
A person does NOT have to be a muslim to do this, in fact more people are killed every day by “Americans” than muslims, well he was also an “American” too, but think about it, being a muslim helped but it maybe a “safe” overgeneralization to say that all billions of muslims are wanting the same reality as this guy did...it just sounds like crazy talk to me for someone to think it...next you'll be saying aliens from mars are lizards or something and they shape shift into muslims at will.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.