WHILE it is still unclear what led a US Army major to shoot dead 13 people on the Fort Hood Texas army base, the reason behind the worst mass shooting on a military facility in the US is not his faith. Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan is a Muslim, and given that the US has been engaged in a “war on terror” for most of this decade, it’s natural to focus on the killer’s religion. But it was the individual, and not the religion, that made Hassan do what he did.
The army psychiatrist was conflicted over what to tell fellow soldiers about fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. As an American soldier with objections to serving overseas, Hassan should have had recourse to voice such concerns. He was not accorded such a privilege. As such, he snapped. And he is not the only one. The killings come at a time when US forces are under increased strain from repeated combat tours and suffering from a marked rise in suicides and depression. Hassan was a victim of the growing strain of multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and the effect this has had on the US military’s men and women with suicide rates and post-traumatic stress disorder hitting record highs. It makes the health of the force a major consideration in President Barack Obama’s current deliberations over sending more US troops to Afghanistan.
To say Hassan killed because he is a Muslim simply extends the long history of encounters between Western civilization and Islam that has produced a tradition of portraying, in largely negative and self-serving ways, the Islamic religion. Most people are familiar with stereotypes and negative imagery of Arabs and Muslims. Indeed, some are so firmly entrenched that the consumers of these images are unable to distinguish them from reality. In such a discourse, Muslims are guilty merely by association.
On the day of Hassan’s rampage, in a completely unrelated incident, a man whose marriage long ago went sour, his home taken in foreclosure, his job lost to incompetence and his finances sunk in bankruptcy, killed one and wounded five in an office in Florida. We do not know the religion of the assailant but had he been Muslim it would have been inserted in the first sentence of all written and broadcast media. Instead, he was portrayed as a mentally ill man who fell victim to countless problems. Religion played no part in the attack.
The same logic should be applied to the Hassan incident, but it is not. When it was first reported that the Fort Hood attacker had an Arab name, the persecution of his religion began. The lesson here is that when a white American Christian goes berserk, all what is required to justify his actions is mounting domestic pressure. But should a Muslim open fire indiscriminately; it is his religion that is always culprit No 1.
Conventional American public opinion views images of Islam as intolerant and predisposed toward violence. But seeing Islam only in terms of violence, real or imagined, is seeing it only in terms of a narrow set of strategic interests. If Arabs and Muslims are extremists in anything, it is in the patience and tolerance they have shown toward persistent Western portrayal of Islam as being a religion of violence and intolerance.
When he actively sought to be discharged because of his inner conflicts between being a loyal US soldier and perhaps getting directly involved in Afghanistan, the military should have let Hassan resign. They should have taken more consideration of the human being in the uniform. They should have taken into account his religious beliefs, which do not whatsoever condone his attack. Islam should not now be made the scapegoat.
Leave Afghanistan
IT is time to say that Afghan war is ill conceived, unwinnable and counterproductive, said The Independent in an editorial that called for a phased withdrawal of British troops. Excerpts
One by one over the past eight years, the arguments for the continued presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan have fallen away. The last one, which held us back until now from calling for withdrawal, was the need to police the Afghan election in August. That election process is now over: Last week the president’s main opponent pulled out, and Hamid Karzai was formally re-elected. That is not a happy outcome. For British soldiers to be deployed in support of a president whose position is bolstered by ballot-rigging tips the balance of our view from reluctant backing for the mission in Afghanistan to regretful opposition.
This newspaper was never keen on the Afghan intervention. Once the conflict began, we asked: “What is this war for?” Although we never received a satisfactory answer, we welcomed the fall of the Taleban and reluctantly accepted the argument that the best protection against their return was to help rebuild the country. It is not so much the casualty rate, however, but the lack of progress that should demand a re-examination of our policy. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s speech last week did not deliver the review needed. It contained the glaring contradiction between the claim that our troops are needed in Afghanistan “to keep the British people safe” and the warning that, if Karzai’s government fails to clean up its act, it will have “forfeited its right to international support”. If you believe that our mission in Afghanistan makes British streets safer, then its continuation should not depend on Karzai. If, on the other hand, you believe, as Kim Howells, the former Foreign Office minister, said last week, that any remote or long-term effect on British streets is outweighed by the propaganda gain to jihadist ideology of our “occupying” a Muslim country, then Karzai’s shortcomings give us another reason to get out.
