[Swiftwater Gazette] What Would Mohammed Do?

[Brad Haslett]

>From Forbes magazine -

Analyzing Major Nidal Hassan
Melik Kaylan, 11.13.09, 12:01 AM ET

Some commentators place Major Nidal Hassan's outrage at Fort Hood in
the continuum of nonreligious psychotic mass killings like those at
Columbine and Virginia Tech. Others liken it to Islamist terror
outrages such as suicide and car bombings. Those on the left seem to
favor the former view, while those on the right prefer the latter.

The New York Times has agonized serially over the pressure on
psychiatrists and Muslims in the Army. Conversely, Dorothy Rabinowitz
in the Wall Street Journal has argued that Major Hasan's motives
needed no elaborate explication of that kind--he was a murderous
jihadi. Furthermore, she and others noted that rampant political
correctness prevented superiors from identifying Hasan as a threat
even after they knew of his pleas to Al Qaeda contacts.

In most Muslim countries, the military would not dither over the
issue. In Turkey, for example, the armed forces impose a strictly
secular ethos on their personnel. Over the years, scores of stealthy
Islamists have been identified and unceremoniously booted out for
trying to proselytize fellow soldiers and generally undermine the
army's values. In less-forgiving countries like Syria, such offenders
tend to disappear without a trace or get funneled clandestinely into
terror cells for missions abroad.

In places like Algeria, Egypt and Libya, Muslim officers watch over
their Muslim conscripts with relentless scrutiny lest any unscripted
forms of freelance worship sneak into the picture. Their prisons are
full of Muslim Brotherhood conspirators undergoing torture--if they
haven't already disappeared into secret graves. In Saddam's military,
turbulent believers often went straight to the frontlines during the
Iran-Iraq war. Others found that their views rebounded onto the limbs
and lives of family members in the most palpable of ways.

Many Muslims desperately flee these countries for the West in order to
pursue their more extreme brand of Islam. We give them the freedom to
do so--in effect the freedom to hate us. Whether Major Hasan's
enormity derived from jihadist motives or because he snapped under
emotional strain, he clearly acted out of religious feelings on that
day, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" as he shot his fellow soldiers. The New
York Times cannot claim that Muslims suffer unbearable prejudice in
the Army and then claim that Major Hasan's conduct had no link to his
being a Muslim. There's the rub: Does the Army have any propaganda
courses at officer level? Was anyone tasked with the job of telling
Major Hasan what life might be like for him in a Muslim military? He
would not have stayed around, or alive, long enough to explore his
hurt feelings as a Muslim.

At Fort Hood and beyond, a great many soldiers are angry that
superiors knew of the Major's Islamist rumblings yet refrained from
intervening. That kind of probing intervention was, ironically, the
job of a psychiatrist. In the Army, as in civilian life, we take
infinite care to be inclusive, to allay the disaffections of
minorities. We do not ask them why their families are here of all
places. This is especially true of the U.S. military, an institution
as color-blind, meritocratic and humane as no other genuinely fighting
force in the world.

Perhaps Major Hasan felt that the Muslim world would not be so divided
if it weren't for the interference of the West and Israel. In that
case, the Army should have offered courses in the history of Islam to
clarify the matter. Muslims fought against one another, martyring the
Prophet's kin, in civil wars over control of the Caliphate soon after
the religion was established. That's how the Shiite-Sunni split first
arose, and it hasn't stopped since. This is not to say that all
Muslims of all nationalities have an equal and natural predisposition
to violence. But to the degree that they derive identity from the
unreconstructed, unreformed Islamic narrative of self, they tend to
have an Us-versus-Them worldview–in which other Muslims frequently
become the "other."

If the Army is too sensitive to take the argument to Muslims in its
ranks, we cannot lay blame there. The U.S. as a whole and the West in
general do not ask Muslims or any other minorities to cast doubt on
the virtues of their own culture. For many that would be tantamount to
"hate speech." But as the conflicts of the world have migrated into
the U.S. and its armed forces, the conflicts of ideas have become a
part of our daily lives. Our strength--our appeal for the
disaffected--lies in our tradition of open debate. For those
minorities less accustomed to such openness, criticism can seem like a
species of bigotry or a kind of culture war. To them we must say,
repeatedly, that they are lucky to hear the sounds of such debate.
Where they come from, too often, it would be settled in exactly the
manner in which Major Hasan chose, only he would not have lived long
enough to carry it out.

Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for
Forbes. His story "Georgia In The Time of Misha" is featured in The
Best American Travel Writing 2008.