More On Hasan, The Fort Hood Shooter
The initial reports said that his parents were Jordanian. That usually means Palestinian. Sure enough
Born and reared in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small Palestinian town near Jerusalem, he joined the Army right out of high school, against his parents’ wishes. The Army, in turn, put him through college and then medical school, where he trained to be a psychiatrist.
But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old man accused of Thursday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., began having second thoughts about a military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim, he told relatives in Virginia.
He had also more recently expressed deep concerns about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan.
“He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier became aware of Internet postings by a man calling himself Nidal Hasan, a law enforcement official said. The postings discussed suicide bombings favorably, but the investigators were not clear whether the writer was Major Hasan.
In one posting on the Web site Scribd, a man named Nidal Hasan compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims.
“If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory,” the man wrote. It could not be confirmed, however, that the writer was Major Hasan.
This is interesting on many levels. It isn’t the first time that physicians have engaged in jihad. A couple of years ago, two physicians ran a vehicle into the airport in Glasgow, Scotland, burning themselves up but thankfully no one else. And of course, during the Nazi period, some physicians were butchers (see Mengele).
I suppose we can’t refer to the attack on Fort Hood as a terror attack, since it was an attack on US troops, not US civilians. But in other ways, Hasan is just a garden variety terrorist. In an earlier post, we learned that he gave away all of his furniture and copies of the Koran. This is kind of like one of those ghastly videos that terrorists make just before blowing themselves up. The kind that circulate over the internet and inspire teenagers in Gaza and elsewhere to destroy their own lives and the lives of as many strangers as they can access. And apparently Hasan was a fan of those sorts of sites, possibly even writing peppy little comments of encouragement for mayhem.
In any case, I can’t bring myself to call this a terror attack because the victims weren’t civilians. But it was definitely jihad. I realize that I am splitting hairs here - no to terrorism, yes to jihad. Is an attack on the military an act of war? Was he a traitor? Yes, he was. The fact that he engaged in jihad makes it equivalent to terrorism. His victims certainly couldn’t tell the difference.
Final thought. What do you suppose Reverend Wright is feeling today? Is he gleefully proclaiming to anyone that will listen that “America’s chickens have come home to roost?”
- Aggie
Carol said,
November 6, 2009 @ 9:06 am
Interesting question, Aggie. Although I hate to have anything in common with the Obama administration, perhaps it would be best to drop the term “terrorism.” When I first heard the story on the radio yesterday, I said, “Oh no, a jihadi. We would be smart to call a jihad a jihad. It would be better if we would all recognize the nature of the enemy, and stop giving them any ammunition at all, like the ability to say “not all terrorists are muslim” and other such foolishness, because all jihadis are muslim, no ifs, no ands, no buts.
judi said,
November 6, 2009 @ 9:59 am
….all jihadis are muslim… Excellent point! Judi
Bloodthirsty Liberal said,
November 6, 2009 @ 10:08 am
We’re splitting (facial) hairs, but I’d say yes to terrorism. His victims were unarmed, as he knew they would be. He lived in this community, worked with and ate with his victims, and gunned them down like animals. Why, if he weren’t Palestinian already, they’d grant him honorary citizenship!
BTL
Bloodthirsty Liberal said,
November 6, 2009 @ 10:10 am
To Carol: But then, when the non-jihadi terrorist appears in our midst, and it certainly happens (see Tim McVeigh), we need to have language to describe that too. Tim McVeigh was a terrorist. Most horrific jihadi acts are both - jihad plus terrorism. In my heart, I consider the attack on Fort Hood terrorism, but labeling it that way makes it easier for politically minded leftists to throw out the entire category, claiming that terrorism is really just warfare. So I guess I think we need both terms.
I agree with BTL, but think that if we’re going to have useful descriptive categories, we need to define terrorism. Almost everyone who attempts this uses a reference to civilians. So, technically, I think it wasn’t terrorism, but, like I said, the victims wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. That is why the term Jihad is so useful.
- Aggie