Fort Hood Tragedy
Updated Below
I try not to bring up current events unless I have something unique to add. In this case, I do have something to add, but you’ll have to trust my word. People join the military for any number of reasons. Many of them do not join to go to war. When time comes for them, they and people that have had a change of heart try to avoid it. One case I know was a man that threw himself down a staircase in an attempt to induce an injury and therefore not get deployed. I would hate to overgeneralize and claim that attempted self-mutilation was common, but it wasn’t grossly exceptional; in other words, my sources were no longer surprised at hearing stories as deployment dates closed for Gulf War II. I don’t know the numbers around suicides, but I do know they also happen as deployment dates approach.
Hearing the news last night and hearing the details, some of my first thoughts were that this was an extreme case of what I just described. The killer had been attempting to get out of his deployment for two years. He had go so far as to secure a lawyer to attempt to get out of his deployment. (See NY Times coverage.) This isn’t what is being discussed today. Today there is endless fascination that this killer was a Muslim. He was a Muslim that in his previous years of service had served our members’ mental health needs and hadn’t gone on a killing spree. Yes, he had voiced opposition, quite loudly, over our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that wasn’t an exceptionally Muslim position.
Now and in the days that follow, people are going to ask Muslims to apologize for the acts of a man that embraced their flag in his rampage. This demand is unreasonable. Similar demands that Christians be made to call account for and apologize for the death George Tiller were similarly unreasonable. Ideologues like the ideas of cosmic clashes of civilizations. Life is much easier when the enemies are them and not among and within us. May the dead rest in peace.
Update:
An excerpt from one of the finer pieces I’ve seen:
But if he was an Al Qaeda sleeper-cell suicide bomber himself, it makes no sense why he’d a) argue with fellow soldiers that the wars are wrong and we should withdraw; and b) that he tried to get out of being deployed to Iraq. The 9/11 terrorists did their best to “blend in” and pretend like they were as American as apple pie, because the point is not to draw any attention to yourself if you’re a terrorist planning to suicide bomb a military base. Moreover, the timing of his shooting, the day before he was to be sent off, shows that his desperation had reached the limit. What this suggests is that the massacre could have been avoided if Maj. Hasan’s objections were taken into account.
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MZ, the shooting was at Fort Hood, TX, not Fort Dix, NJ.
M.Z.: Doh!
I thought I heard the doctor survived?
He is alive, but I think it is obvious he was trying to get kill himself and take as many with him as he could.
I’ve edited the wording there. I wrote what I hadn’t intended.
You take an oath when you join the service. You have to know there’s a possibility of losing your life, or of taking another’s. I know this isn’t a Catholic issue per se, but we’re the only people left on the planet who take marriage vows seriously. And we’re supposed to take religious vows seriously, too. A person’s word has to mean something. As tough as it is in the case of deployment, we have to hold people to their voluntarily-accepted obligations.
M.Z., the shooting was, you know, accompanied by at least one shout of “Allahu Akbar!”
Although his opposition to the war(s) is not distinctively Muslim, it seems to me that this battle-cry is. It seems that, by this act, the shooter himself rather dramatically announced his Muslim faith as being a central issue in the shooting.
Given this, it seems a stretch to argue that Islam, at least as this man and others seem to understand Islam, is not relevant to the events at Fort Hood.
Whoa… you seem to have just now rewritten your post. My previous comment was addressed more to the earlier version, not so much to this new one.
I made one wording change, “his death” to “his rampage”, and the title change after one of my dumbest errors was pointed out by Mark.
That he is Muslim does have some relevance. It does give us some indication of his identity and personality.
May the murdered rest in peace, and may the murderers enjoy the full fruit of their sin both in this life and the next.
I agree that the murderer could have been simply trying to avoid deploying, but is it not a little more likely to think that a man who is (reportedly) shouting “Allahu Akbar!” as he is gunning down people on an Army post has assumed the role of Jihadi, rather than a CO?
I am happy to wait for all the facts to come to the surface, but my first impression is that he believed that he would be rewarded for killing infidels, a misreading of the Koran and Haddith that evidently thousands of Jihadis have made in the recent past.
Or do you believe that he really was trying to avoid deploying by shooting himself in the foot and simply missed 50 or 60 times?
I think he had the full expectation of being killed. I do think it was intended to be a murder suicide.
I would agree that he thought he was doing good. I believe his belief in Islam and opposition to the Iraq War were not the triggers though. I believe the trigger for this action was his imminent deployment.
By the way:
Would someone explain to me how a reader, when looking at an opinion-post blogged here at Vox Nova, is supposed to know WHICH blog contributor wrote that post?
I ask because, in the first comment, Mark Gordon corrected M.Z. by name. Until Mark did that, I myself had no idea who’d written the post.
How did Mark know? Is there some hidden label somewhere in the page that I can’t see? Or is my browser blocking something which would allow me to see the words “I wrote this. — M.Z.” at the bottom of the post?
I should clarify: I arrived at this post’s “permlink” directly via a link from Inside Catholic; I did not see the Vox Nova homepage en route.
Now that I’ve gone to the homepage, I see that M.Z. is given attribution at the bottom of the short-version of the post, there. Perhaps that’s how Mark Gordon knew who wrote the piece; he came from the homepage?
But I don’t see anything on this page itself that indicates M.Z. as the author. That seems a fairly profound oversight. Am I missing something?
No Muslim should feel that they have to apologize for what Maj. Hasan did yesterday. Nor should any non-Muslim indict a religion of one billion people, it’s founder or scripture based on this massacre. Malik Nidal Hasan is the one responsible. Period.
That said, it’s clear from the reporting that there was a strong religious and/or ethnic motivation here. Hasan’s opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as reported, seems to have been predicated solely on the fact we are fighting Muslims. Hasan apparently had recently undergone something of a recommitment to his Muslim faith, and had lately adopted the practice of wearing distinctively Arabic clothing, etc. And, of course, there is the reporting about him shouting “God is great” at the moment he began shooting.
My point is that Hasan’s Muslim faith appears not simply an incidental factor in this event. To pretend that it is does no service to the truth.
Excelsior,
The code for the WordPress theme being used by Vox Nova does not automatically insert the name of the author of a post into the archive template. The name of the author appears only on the blog template, which is used here as the homepage.
There are certain places, like here and Andy McCarthy at the Corner, that are constructing the narrative that this is evidence that Muslims in America are a sleeper cell just waiting to strike at us and destroy our country and western civilization. It is grossly irresponsible. When I make the claim that him being a Muslim is not the best way to understand this act, that is the stuff I’m trying to counter. I think it is abundantly clear that absent his deployment, there would have been no shootings. Now maybe someday something else might have set him off, we’ll never know, but I think those attempting to ignore that the specific impetus was his deployment are engaging in dangerous demagoguery.
To me, the bigger issue than his religion is the fact that this disgruntled religious fanatic was a military psychologist. A lot of people must have been ignoring warning signs, possibly out of fear of appearing to discriminate.
Very well said, MZ.
MZ, the fact that someone somewhere is concocting a loopy narrative based on little evidence is no reason to respond with a loopy narrative of your own. For instance, you write: “I think it is abundantly clear that absent his deployment, there would have been no shootings.”
After 24 hours and what little we know is it really “abundantly clear?” Rather than let yourself be baited into yet another us-versus-them, white hats and black hats, all heat no light debate, why not just wait for the truth to come out?
Mark, I hadn’t really thought about that quote. It is disturbing. As Catholics, we’re not determinists. We know that the root cause of sin is ourselves. It makes me want to go back and edit my last comment. The problem wasn’t the shooter’s co-workers failing to pay attention; the problem was the guy firing the gun.
I do not think anything is quite clear yet about this situation other than the known facts. We know who did it, we know how many were killed and injured, and now we apparently know who stopped it. That is about all we really know for sure. There is much speculation, conjecture, and even many unsourced supposed “facts” floating around the net, but it would be best to reserve judgement (that going for the right, left, center, and anyone else).
Certainly deployment related anxiety is a real issue, and it does often lead people to do stupid things. That may very well be a factor in this case. Perhaps since the perp lived we may even find out something from him, but he may also decide to spin the event as well.
This case certainly does not prove the charge of a Muslim 5th column in our midst, but nor does it disprove such a theory. In my opinion our society and culture and government is not capable of carrying out the sort of analysis and judgement needed to either confirm or refute such a theory.
Interesting point from my point of view, was that the only armed people involved were the mentally unbalanced perpatrator of the crime and a civilian police officer. No innocent citizens or even on-duty military personnel were armed it would seem. I seem to remember reading once that the Israelis have long thought we were a bit crazy for not keeping our military personnel prepared for self defense.
I have only conjecture to offer and little else. Hasan is listed as a psychiatrist which would make him an M.D. He is 39 years old and single. I do not know what kind of psych testing is done in the military but I read where he had no psych problems listed in an examination in September. One of the EWTN radio programs in the afternoon had an interview with someone who seems to focus his life’s work on jihad threats and is spinning this as such. The host seems to have been caught up in this view. I was immediately opposed to their views.
It seems to me that Hasan is mentally disturbed and his rampage seems to be similar to what took place at Virginia Tech. His religion could have been any religion which would be used as a rationalization for his hatred of self and others.