Fort Hood massacre provokes outcry in Guardian and BBC…over “fear-mongering hysteria” against Muslims
A Muslim, Palestinian-American soldier massacres 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. Evidence is already available that the perpetrator, Major Nidal Hasan, a military psychiatrist, was incensed at the prospect of being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and that he had compared suicide bombing to the bravery of soldiers in combat who might fall on a grenade to protect the lives of their comrades.
It is also clear that he is a very devout Muslim who opposes the wars he feared being sent to fight in. According to the testimony of a former colleague, Col. Terry Lee: “He said maybe the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor…At first we thought he was talking about how Muslims should stand up and help the armed forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but apparently that wasn’t the case.”
So clearly, there are good grounds for suspecting that this might at least have something to do with the kind of Islamist agenda which has provoked massacres from Bali to Tel Aviv, from London to New York and from Madrid to Mumbai. Note that all I am suggesting here is that there are “good grounds for suspecting”. In other words, I am arguing that any open minded and intelligent analyst would want to take that possibility into consideration.
Well, not if you write for the Guardian which raced out two op-eds with the aim not of expressing sympathy for the victims but of starkly warning that red neck, Islamophobic loons were about to have a field day. But if its loons you’re after you rarely have to search further than the Guardian’s editorial page.
First off, consider a piece by Wajahat Ali, a Muslim American and author of “The Domestic Crusaders” –the first major play, the Guardian tells us, about Muslims living in a post 9/11 America. Opening with some rather obviously pro-forma words about “this tragic outburst of violence”, he wastes no time (he’s 25 words into the article) in getting to the task at hand which is to condemn “a fear-mongering hysteria concerning [Hasan's] supposed religious motivations [which] is taking priority over questions regarding his mental health.”
Who said that religious motivation and mental illness were mutually exclusive? Picking up a gun and randomly slaughtering one’s colleagues is hardly a sign of a healthy and rounded psychological profile in any case, at least where I’m from. In a certain sense, Hasan must have been mad. The question is, was he also angry? The evidence suggests he might have been.
But evidence matters little when one has a politically correct agenda to push. From here on out, the piece just gets weirder and weirder. By paragraph two, Hasan has now become the “alleged shooter” (My itallics). Ali is then keen to tell us that Hasan, “is an American-born medical doctor and licensed psychiatrist, who also happens to be a Muslim born to Palestinian immigrant parents.” Sorry? What’s all this “also happens to be” about? The ostensible purpose of the article is to warn of the dangers of jumping to premature conclusions. Yet it is blindingly clear from this that Ali has decided in advance that Hasan’s Muslim and Palestinian background is an incidental item. How does he know?
Paragraph three repeats the mantra that Hasan is merely “the alleged shooter” and then gets back on message with a flourish on the subject of “bigoted bile vilifying Islam and questioning the loyalty of American Muslims”.
I think that that is enough mental sludge for one article but if you’re a sucker for punishment, see the link below to read it in full.
One of the problems with the kind of rubbish which passes for analysis in the politically correct media is that it is desperately vulnerable to some readily available evidence which renders its arguments ridiculous. To wit, consider the second offering from the Guardian. Written by Michael Tomasky, the piece has been commissioned to push the same line: Islam can have had nothing to do with it, and beware those redneck hatemongers who say that it does. The trouble is that in his very first paragraph, Tomasky says the following:
“We should begin by noting that there is no powerful “anti-Muslim sentiment” afoot – there were 156 hate-crime incidents in the US in 2006, the most recent year for which numbers were available. One hesitates to call such a figure tolerable, but as a point of comparison, the UK, with less than one-fifth of America’s population, had 106 such incidents in a 12-month period covering 2007-2008.”
So if there’s no real problem with Islamophobia in America, what is all this about? Tomasky goes on to tell us:
“Even so, the national mood, in the wake of divisive off-year elections and terrible unemployment figures, is brittle. On the day of Hasan’s massacre, about 5,000 rightwing “tea partiers” stormed Capitol hill. They’re the kind of folks who call Barack Obama a “Muslim” as an epithet (but they’re equal opportunity: there were also signs to the effect that the president is controlled by the Rothschilds).”
“The national mood…is brittle”? How brittle? More “brittle” than after 9/11 when the much talked about anti-Muslim pogroms conspicuously failed to materialise either? And if he’s pinning his argument on people who can’t make up their minds on whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or a Jew, doesn’t all this look ever so slightly tenuous?
Weirdly, Tomasky concludes with the following:
“He was a native-born citizen. He deserves exactly the same legal representation and presumptions as if he were a white man from corn-country. And he deserves exactly the same amount of anger and fury and contempt from the rest of us for this unspeakable thing he did. Let him rot – but because of what he did, not because of who he is.”
Is anyone actually suggesting that he would not get the same legal representation “as if he were a white man from corn-country”? And if bigotry is what we should be concerned about, what sort of bigoted images is Tomasky conjuring up for his readers with his reference to white men from “corn-country” anyway? Finally, what’s all this fake indignation about the “anger and fury and contempt” we should feel for “this unspeakable thing he did” and about how he should rot “because of what he did, not because of who he is”?
Actually, the reaction of all of the people I have spoken to after the news of the massacre broke was not anger, fury and contempt. It was a profound sense of shock that 13 families and 13 circles of close friends had lost someone they loved.
But when the shock subsides the serious people have to get to grips with a subject which the Guardian and company would have us ignore. For it is Tomasky’s closing words that give the game away. He is desperate to tell us that “what he did” must not be conflated with “who he is”.
But that prejudges the issue at hand. For Islamist terrorists across the world, what they do is explained by who they are. If the investigation finds that Hasan is nothing more significant than a loon who snapped then, from a public policy perspective at least, the matter can be left at that. But if, as seems probable, Hasan’s politico-religious beliefs go some or all of the way to explaining the massacre he perpetrated then we need to talk about it openly and work out what to do.
This all smacks of an agenda of denial that we are now well used to. The ideological underpinnings of terrorism must be airbrushed out of the picture because they contradict the self-hating narrative of western villainy that lies at the core of the politically correct mindset. That is why the first reaction of so much of the political-cultural establishment is so furiously to pre-empt the kind of open minded discussion that any reasonable citizen would want to engage in.
It is that mindset which also produced the BBC’s own expression of the same agenda in an article ludicrously headlined: “Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army”. As Mark Steyn put it on his website: “Really? Right now the body count stands at: Non-Muslims 13, Muslims 0.”
But all that could be about to change, the BBC tells us: “The Arab-American Institute – which condemned the massacre – said it had received at least one threatening phone call, and expected more.” Cripes. If they get another two, that’ll be one per hundred million of the American population. But have no fear, any such “threatening” phone calls will instantly be explained in Guardian and BBC circles as a product of the ideological bigotry of the American right. No loons-that-snapped in sight.
The truth is that no-one yet knows what motivated Major Nidal Hasan to slaughter his fellows at Fort Hood. The fair, reasonable and mature response at this stage is to withhold final judgement until an investigation has been completed or at least until the evidence in the public domain becomes overwhelming, while talking freely about the evidence that already exists and what it points to.
But it is unfair, unreasonable and frankly infantile to impose predetermined agendas designed to shut down debate from the start. Welcome to the world of the Guardian and the BBC.
To read the first Guardian op-ed referred to, click here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/06/fort-hood-shootings-hasan-muslim
To read the second Guardian op-ed referred to, click here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/06/murder-first-foremost-nidal-hassan
To read the BBC article referred to, click here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8347586.stm
For the Mark Steyn comments referred to, click here:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjlhMTk3YjhiMWNiNTE0OTBmOTc1ZjQ4MzM0MjFlMWQ=
For a hard-hitting analysis of US political correctness on the matter, click here:
Tags: Fort Hood, Islam, terrorism
November 8th, 2009 at 11:06 am
I took a look at Irshad Manji’s blog . For anyone who does not know her, she is the author of “The trouble with Islam today – a wake-up call for honesty and change”. In contrast to the Guardian she is sincerely honest and is not afraid to introduce the subject head on for discussion on her website as follows:
“You’ve probably heard about the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas – America’s biggest military base. The main suspect has a Muslim name. Does this matter? If he did it in the name of Islam, then religion is a motivation. In that case, his Muslim identity is relevant. But if he did it out of other motives – say, mental illness – then his Muslim ID means nothing. That’s my take. Yours?”
http://www.irshadmanji.com/
November 9th, 2009 at 12:08 am
The Guardian jihad against America continues:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/08/fort-hood-muslim-new-mccarthyism
Now the documented fact that Hasan was a Moslem has suddenly become a matter of opinion:
“Because the shooter appears to be a Muslim. ”
and the McCartyistic American press/society/people has immediately sprung to the amazing conclusion that a man who shouted “Allahu Akbar” before emptying his gun into a crowded group of soldiers might have had a motive associated with his religion for doing so:
“It is interesting to see how the media have already reported on this tragic event – immediately, questions (and answers) were posed about the shooter’s ethnicity and religion: implicitly (and in some cases, explicitly) making clear that such things were not just relevant to the story, but probably causal factors. The fact that he was born and raised on American soil is irrelevant.”
The sickness at the Guardian and among its contributors is deep and wide, but also foolish – who on earth do they think they are fooling?
(and, by the way – his American upbringing is very much to the point, and relevant – the major question these “McCarthyites” are asking is how a second generation American could choose his religion over the country that gave his parents a new home, where he was born, raised, educated for free at medical school).