The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
NOTE: James Taranto is out on assignment today. The excerpt below is from the BOTW archives dated Nov. 9, 2009.
Prejudice, Denial and Fort Hood
“We don’t know all the answers yet,” the Associated Press quotes President Obama as saying Friday about the Fort Hood massacre. “And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.”
Not only is the president right, his advice is tautological. Premature judgment is ill-advised by definition. But one senses in much of the commentary about suspect Nidal Malik Hasan a desire to avoid considered judgment as well–not just a reluctance to jump to conclusions, but a drive to go far out of one’s way to avoid ever reaching one particular conclusion.
“It is unclear what might have motivated Major Hasan,” the New York Times reports this morning. “He seems to have been influenced by a mixture of political, religious and psychological factors.” A Times story yesterday suggested that Hasan was driven crazy by the stress of his job as a psychiatrist:
Major Hasan’s motives are still being investigated. But those who work day in and day out treating the psychological wounds of the country’s warriors say Thursday’s rampage has put a spotlight on the strains of their profession and of the patients they treat. . . .
Many military [mental health] professionals, meanwhile, describe crushing schedules with 10 or more patients a day, most struggling with devastating trauma or mutilated bodies that are the product of war and the highly advanced care that kept them alive.
Some of those hired to heal others end up needing help themselves. Some go home at night too depressed to talk to their children. Others, like Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist at Fort Hood, ultimately quit.
That’s informative, isn’t it? Some, some and others, respectively, do something, something else and another thing. It occurs to us, though, that only one military psychiatrist is alleged to have committed mass murder. Is there anything else that might set him apart from his peers?
Here’s one clue, from London’s Guardian: The gunman “allegedly shouted ‘Allahu Akbar,’ or ‘God is greatest,’ as he opened fire.” The paper’s Michael Tomasky helpfully explains:
The fact that Hassan reportedly shouted the above is meant, I suppose, to imply that he was an extremist fanatic.
I’m not sure that it does. My understanding is that it’s something Arab people often shout before doing something or other.
So, to recap: Some end up needing help. Some go home depressed. Others quit. Still others do something or other! And if they’re Arab, they “often shout,” according to Tomasky. But although we do not wish to jump to conclusions, we should point out that they do not often shoot dozens of people, and that doing so could be taken as evidence of being an “extremist fanatic.”
Here’s another straw in the wind, from London’s Daily Telegraph:
Hasan worshipped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a “spiritual adviser” to three of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001.
Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. . . .
The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.
Hasan’s eyes “lit up” when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday’s horrific shooting spree.
The Middle East Media Research Institute last month excerpted a blog post from al-Awlaki’s Web site in which he cheerleads for America’s enemies:
America failed to defeat the mujahedeen when it gave its president unlimited support, how can it win with Obama who is on a short leash? If America failed to win when it was at its pinnacle of economic strength, how can it win today with a recession–if not a depression–at hand?
The simple answer is: America cannot and will not win. The tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide Jihad movement.
Today al-Awlaki has a post titled “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing”:
Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam.
The Sunday Telegraph reports that Hasan “once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats”:
He also told colleagues at America’s top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July. . . .
Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a “Muslim first and American second.”
One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints.
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