Saturday, November 07, 2009

The Fort Hood Shooting and Radical Islam

We now know that Major Nidal Hasan was a member of a radical mosque in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was an American citizen, yet, apparently, couldn't bring himself to do simple things like be photographed with women. He sympathized with Muslims fighting his fellow soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he yelled, "Allahu Akbar" while mowing down American citizens.

Yet the MSM has tried very hard to downplay the influence his Muslim faith had on Hasan's murderous behavior. For example, on NPR's Way With Words yesterday, host Michel Martin led a roundtable discussion of Hasan which was long on PSTD speculation and very, very short on any discussion of Hasan's radical Islamic views. There were plenty of comparisons with Timothy McVeigh, as if McVeigh's actions were based on his Christian faith (McVeigh was not a Christian, but still, as a white guy, he must've been a radical Christian, right? They're so violent in this country!). But the roundtable just couldn't bring themselves to discuss how Wahhabism influenced Hasan's behavior.

I'm not advocating that we fingerprint all Muslims or round them up and put them in concentration camps, but it seems like Hasan's weird and creepy behavior was noted repeatedly by colleagues and supervisors, yet no one did anything to stop him. Was there simply no way to do more than "watch" Hasan before he decided to kill other soldiers?