“The vast majority of American Muslims are law-abiding, upstanding citizens who vehemently shun the violence embraced by the radical and dangerous few. In many ways, American Muslims have the most to lose when extremists carry out their warped plans, and they suffer most when they are unjustly lumped in with the radicals.”
- Washington Post editorial “An enemy within: Combating the spread of homegrown extremism” (December 16, 2009)
Dear citizens, The Washington Post editorial cited above begins with a list of four incidents of people with Muslim names or associated with people with Muslim names who were arrested for allegedly plotting to attack the United States or to otherwise engage in terrorist acts. Of course, we recoil from this, especially today (December 26) the day after a Nigerian college student from London allegedly attempted to blow up a plane on final approach into Detroit. In none of these incidents were Americans harmed. In yesterday’s attempt, the outcome seems to have been third-degree burns to the leg and perhaps groin of the would-be martyr. Absent fatalities, the damage from these events is rather more to those “unjustly lumped in with the radicals.”
Why do we (and The Post editors) recognize that the first sentence in the quote at the top clearly applies to us (“law-abiding, upstanding citizens”), yet the second, we feel certain, does not pertain to us at all? The answer, of course, is that we manufacture the identities we use to define the miscreants, carefully drawing lines that ensure we are outside the dangerous and immoral group. If we are Muslim, we note that these are the fanatics who do not represent the faith. (True.) Among those of other faiths or no faith, this is a much broader threat. (False.) Some implicitly and others explicitly condemn the whole of Islam. Note the comment from Pat Robertson below, for example. This effort does little to protect us from actual harm. It merely provides an illusory space where we can pretend we are blameless and bear no responsibility. It is a Fantasyland where we are solely victims, distinct and pure of all evil. It is self-defeating.
Why do we draw the lines around or through a faith and not a geography? Note, for example, that people who have resided or spent time in northern Virginia have shot up in the past several years: Fort Hood, a campus in Woodbridge, Virginia, the campus at Virginia Tech, and, as noted in the beginning of the editorial cited above, have traveled to Pakistan hoping to shoot American soldiers. What is wrong with northern Virginia? Should northern Virginians be taking the same actions and feeling the same anxiety and remorse that the “moderate Muslims” among them are expected to take and to feel? Will Pat Robertson condemn us? This violence is a shared problem that we must all work at together.
Consider, for example, the challenge a “moderate Muslim” has in dissuading a young man bent on revenge after the mistreatment of prisoners in our custody at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or after we have mistakenly killed civilians in an air-strike in Iraq or Afghanistan. A “moderate Muslim’s” task in this case is all but hopeless if we refuse to cooperate. Terrorist recruiters misrepresent our actions and our intent, but our actions aid their efforts. We are not powerless here, and we are not without a role. We can do much more to counter their efforts. In Afghanistan, a new focus on reducing civilian casualties will avoid supporting al Qaeda efforts. Governmental and non-governmental aid efforts help. We must support more, like doing something meaningful for the 4.8 million Iraqis displaced by the war we launched in 2003.
We can help here, too. Rather than applauding the way Muslims are treated here in America—as opposed to how we perceive they are being treated in, say, Europe—we can work much harder at treating them simply as “Americans”—not “Muslim-Americans” and not “moderate Muslim-Americans,” terms that depict them as “good” but still not us. Non-Muslims can work at developing a better understanding of the faith and at treating its adherents in the same manner as they respond to the other variations of the Abrahamic faiths. That would end a distinction—erase a line—that pushes Muslims out of our community and makes the task that we assigned to the moderates more difficult than it need be. We could redraw the lines to include all those who reject violence in one welcoming body on one side and those few who embrace violence on the other. It could include all northern Virginians in a common effort to reduce violence. It could include all Americans.
The essay below, written for a school assignment, notes that angry and emotionally disturbed men with guns are much more of a danger to us than Muslim extremists. The faith of these men is often ignored if they are not Muslims. Their faith is immaterial. What matters is that they needed help and that that help was not available in time or sufficient amount. And so, these men, the group who will kill you, began blasting away lethally at people who have everything or something or nothing to do with the demons who haunted them. The line between them and us is far more important than the line between my faith and yours or the faith of anyone else. We must act within that reality.
- Alan Howe, December 2009
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The Group That Will Kill You
On April 3rd, 2009, hours after Jiverly Voong walked into an immigration assistance center in Binghamton, New York, and began shooting, killing thirteen and wounding four, the Syracuse Post-Standard provided a “glance at some of the worst U.S. mass shootings in recent years:”
• March 29, 2009: Robert Stewart, 45, shot and killed eight people at Pinelake Health and Rehab in Carthage, N.C. before a police officer shot him and ended the rampage.
• March 29, 2009: Devan Kalathat, 42, shot and killed his two children and three other relatives, then killed himself in an upscale neighborhood of Santa Clara, Calif. Kalathat’s wife was critically injured.
• March 10, 2009: Michael McLendon, 28, killed 10 people including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff’s deputy across two rural Alabama counties. He then killed himself.
• Feb. 14, 2008: Former student Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, fatally shooting five students and wounding 18 others before committing suicide.
• Dec. 5, 2007: Robert A. Hawkins, 19, opened fire with a rifle at a Von Maur store in an Omaha, Neb., mall, killing eight people before taking his own life. Five more people were wounded, two critically.
• April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, fatally shot 32 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, then killed himself in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
• Oct. 2, 2006: Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, shot to death five girls at West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania, then killed himself.
• March 21, 2005: Student Jeffrey Weise, 16, killed nine people, including his grandfather and his grandfather’s companion at home. Also included were five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard at Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn. He then killed himself. Seven students were wounded.
• March 12, 2005: Terry Ratzmann, 44, gunned down members of his congregation as they worshipped at the Brookfield Sheraton in Brookfield, Wisconsin, slaying seven and wounding four before killing himself.
• March 5, 2001: Charles “Andy” Williams, 15, killed two fellow students and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, Calif.
• Nov. 2, 1999: Copier repairman Byran Uyesugi, 40, fatally shoots seven people at Xerox Corp. in Honolulu. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
• July 29, 1999: Former day trader Mark Barton, 44, killed nine people in shootings at two Atlanta brokerage offices, then killed himself.
• April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school’s library.
• May 21, 1998: Two teenagers were killed and more than 20 people hurt when Kip Kinkel, 17, opened fire at a high school in Springfield, Ore., after killing his parents.
• March 24, 1998: Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, killed four girls and a teacher at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school. Ten others were wounded in the shooting.
• Oct. 16, 1991: A deadly shooting rampage took place in Killeen, Texas, as George Hennard opened fire at a Luby’s Cafeteria, killing 23 people before taking his own life. 20 others were wounded in the attack (Carlic).
In all, that is 151 fatalities and at least 124 wounded, not counting the killers. Nineteen men committed these acts, angry and often emotionally disturbed men with guns. (I have left off several of the earlier mass killings on the Post-Standard list, ending, purposefully, with the killing at Killeen, Texas, which had been, for a time, the most lethal in modern U.S. history.)
The Bureau of Justice reports that over ninety-three percent of the state and federal prison population is male. They commit the bulk of the murders in the United States. The FBI reports that of the 15,935 murders committed in 2004, men committed at least 10,262. (The FBI lists 1,130 murders committed by women and 4,543 committed by “unknown.”) Terrorism is more than merely murder, but it is the fear of death at the hands of terrorists, not a terrorist’s political motives, that most affects people. Given the rather large gulf between the annual murder totals and the relatively rare occurrence of terrorism in the United States, Americans would do well to more carefully consider where the threats to their lives lie.
On November 5th, 2009, U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, walked into a deployment readiness center at Fort Hood, outside Killeen, Texas, and opened fire on his fellow soldiers, killing twelve and wounding thirty-one. His victims wore the same uniforms as Hasan, many preparing to accompany him on his projected tour in Afghanistan where, ironically, he would be helping soldiers cope with the stress of war. Like the men above, it seems Hasan was also in need of help. He did not get it.
The comments below track the reporting of this event in The Washington Post from November 6th to November 14th, a total of twenty-five stories and two editorials. November 15th was the first day the paper carried no reporting or editorials on the attack. The stories go generally through four phases. First, the stories focus on the shooting and, to a lesser extent, on the alleged shooter. Reporting then shifts to more stories placing the attack in context, including background stories about Hasan, stress on soldiers, Muslims in the Army, and the connection to Virginia Tech, where Hasan graduated in 1995. Then reporting shifted to covering “finger pointing” aimed at blaming law enforcement and intelligence organizations for failing to detect and disrupt the attack. Finally, the stories focus on the legal proceedings related to Hasan’s trial.
Encouragingly, The Post refrained from the familiar and fear-inspiring discourse of militant jihadists attacking our freedoms that might be anticipated in this case. Besides the legal cover The Post reporters and editors habitually adopt by describing the perpetrators of crimes as “the suspect” or “the accused” or “the alleged,” The Post describes the shooter in this case as “Major Hasan” or by his occupation, “Army psychiatrist,” significantly more often than any other appellation. Hasan is fairly frequently described as a “devout Muslim” but without clear allusions to so-called militant Islam or jihad. He is rendered as a decent person in several instances, making his acts all the more incomprehensible and seemingly irrational.
Coverage on the 6th includes four stories: a description of the attack, a short background on what was then known about Hasan, a story noting that Hasan worshipped at a mosque in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, and a story about the strain on troops at Fort Hood caused by repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories note that Hasan, a “devout Muslim,” had, according to his aunt, “endured name-calling and harassment about his Muslim faith for years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks” (Flaherty). The stories note that Hasan thought the United States should not be in Iraq or Afghanistan while he apparently also urged the US to support the security forces in both countries (Slevin). The stories also note that over 500 Fort Hood soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and at home, noting “[v]iolent outbursts such as shootings by soldiers at Army bases have occurred in recent years, including at Fort Hood, where several killings were reported over the past two years” (Tyson). None, of course, gained notice like this attack. It is, perhaps, this reality—that other military members have engaged in largely ignored fratricide—that steers Washington Post reporting toward a more nuanced and more understanding depiction of Major Hasan’s mass murder.
Major Hasan was a troubled man in a troubled service, recently reassigned from one troubled area to another. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Hasan worked for most of his time as an Army psychiatrist, doctors and staff deal with shortages in a system that is “undermanned” and “overworked” trying to deal with “a soaring suicide rate” and “[s]ome 34,000 soldiers [that] have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder since 2003” (Hull). At Fort Hood, Hasan had an altercation with a fellow soldier at his apartment complex that demonstrates how these stresses manifest in daily life.
John Van de Walker scraped a key along the full length of the passenger’s side of Hasan’s car. Then he removed and destroyed a bumper sticker that read, “Allah is Love,” according to several residents…Van de Walker had recently returned from service in Iraq and was distraught that his neighbor was a Muslim (Rucker).
An anonymous source described the response to Hasan to Philip Rucker, who claims to have verified the account with other neighbors in the apartment complex.
“Everyone else just sat down there and drunk their beer and looked at him and giggled at him,” the woman said, starting to cry. “They just would laugh at him when he walked down with his Muslim clothes…He was mistreated. He didn’t have nobody. He was all alone. He went to his apartment there and was all alone.”
This was a continuation of Hasan’s experiences at Walter Reed treating soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Post’s Greg Jaffe led a team of reporters who describe the stresses on Hasan during his tour there: “Hasan had begun complaining that soldiers he was treating were biased against him. ‘They would complain that he was Muslim and they were coming from Iraq’” (Jaffe).
In the search for motivation for Major Hasan’s attack, the case that he was under extreme stress seems well made. There is also a search to determine if his faith or his association with “radical” members of his faith spurred him to act. Besides the mosque in Silver Spring, Hasan attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, at a time when it was led by “Anwar al-Aulaqi, a figure who crossed paths with al-Qaeda associates, including two Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers” (Hsu). And—presto!—the discourse immediately turns into another assault on Islam and Muslims without regard to variations within the faith or modest levels of civility. The Post presents the views of evangelist Pat Robertson who, according to the Post, claims “the military overlooked Hasan’s troubles because of a politically correct refusal to see Islam for what it is.”
“Islam is a violent – I was going to say religion – but it’s not a religion. It’s a political system. It’s a violent political system bent on the overthrow of governments of the world and world domination” (Boorstein).
The association of Hasan and al-Aulaqi is apparently rather more benign. Alerted to a possible threat, United Sates intelligence agencies late last year and early this year “intercepted 10 to 20 e-mails from Hasan to Anwar al-Aulaqi” and, in information attributed to Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the Post indicates “Aulaqi responded to Hasan at least twice.” Rep. Hoekstra admitted that the “responses from Aulaqi were maybe pretty innocent” (Rucker, “Hasan”). US agencies declined to investigate further the association and are being criticized for perhaps failing to unearth a jihadist plot.
Throughout the reporting and editorials, the Post takes an approach that is at least even-handed toward Hasan and Islam. Stories repeatedly note that others saw Hasan as gentle and non-violent and not the type of person anyone suspected to act out in this manner. Representatives of the two area mosques are quoted at length and allowed to explain that their faith abhors this conduct. Even on the question of Hasan’s association with al-Aulaqi, who referred to Hasan’s attack as “a heroic act,” Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center members were quoted denouncing al-Aulaqi’s statement and allowed to separate themselves from his actions:
“This was a really disgraceful statement from a blog of our former short-lived Imam Aulaqi,” the mosque’s outreach director, Johari Abdul-Malik, said Monday. “Aulaqi wasn’t angry like that when he was here with us. He changed after he left, after 9/11. He became a different imam (Rucker, “Hasan’s”).
Indeed, direct, rational religious motivation likely had little to do with Major Hasan’s angry attack against the soldiers he had dedicated the last several years of his life supporting. Recently transferred to Fort Hood, Hasan cannot have known that the population he was shooting at did not include Muslims. Indeed, he could not know that there was not an equally conflicted Muslim directly in the path of one of his bullets. Moreover, U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan can be said to be defending Muslims against other Muslims, especially in Afghanistan where Hasan was expected to deploy.
Hasan’s act was irrational as he was not attacking the source of his conflict. Soldiers do not choose which wars to fight. They are ordered into combat by civilian leaders, responding to the wishes, or lax supervision, of the American electorate. Hasan knows the soldiers are victims of these decisions; that is what angered him about his personal circumstance. He was not allowed to opt out of the decision to fight two wars. The people he shot were not those responsible for the decisions. They were, like him, those bearing the cost of the decisions, truly his brothers and sisters in arms. Killing them cannot advance Hasan’s cause.
The easiest and perhaps most affective and effective approach for would-be terrorists longing to attack within the United States would be to use our culture against us: to visit a gun show, load up, and blast away in a church or school or mall. The Post’s rather even-handed reporting notwithstanding, the hyping of this tragedy in some cases, the intense focus in most, and the insistence on declaring that this attack was, above and beyond all other considerations, an attack by a Muslim who betrayed his brothers-in-arms, shows that fear—the terrorist’s principle weapon—is launched even without the participation of terrorists. Will another Muslim in uniform attack us? Will another Muslim next attack innocent civilians? And yet, this fear does little to address the larger and more likely threat—that men with guns will kill us. Representative Pete King (R-NY) has repeatedly introduced legislation to keep guns out of the hands of terrorist suspects. Even this seemingly reasonable goal is thwarted by gun-rights advocates who see a slippery slope attached to even the most reasonable restrictions. The fear associated with Major Hasan’s attack does not seem destined to overcome this resistance. Meanwhile, mental health support for men, including men in uniform, remains inadequate. And so, not radical Muslims, but rather, angry and emotionally disturbed men with guns remains the group that will kill you.
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Works Cited
Boorstien, Michelle. “Muslims in military seek a bridge between worlds.” Washington Post
11 Nov. 2009 A7.
Carlic, Steve. “A glance at US mass shootings in recent years.” Syracuse Post-Standard 3 Apr. 2009, 20 Nov. 2009 <http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/
a_glance_at_us_mass_shootings.html>
“Crime in the United States, 2004,” Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html
Flaherty, Mary Pat, William Wan, and Christian Davenport. “Suspect, devout Muslim from Va., wanted Army discharge, aunt said.” Washington Post 6 Nov. 2009, A1+.
Hsu, Spencer, and Carrie Johnson. “Authorities scrutinize links between Fort Hood suspect, imam said to back al-Qaeda.” Washington Post 9 Nov. 2009 A1+.
Hull, Anne, and Dana Priest. “At Walter Reed, a palpable strain on mental-health system.” Washington Post 7 Nov. 2009 A1+.
Prison Inmates at Mid-Year 2008: Statistical Tables, Heather C. West, PhD., and William J, Sabol, PhD., Bureau of Justice Statistics, March 2009, Revised April 8, 2009.
Rucker, Philip, Carrie Johnson, and Ellen Nakashima. “Hasan e-mails to cleric didn’t result in inquiry.” Washington Post 10 Nov. 2009 A1+.
Rucker, Philip. “The Lonely Life of ‘Number Nine.’” Washington Post 8 Nov. 2009, A1+.
Slevin, Peter. “Rampage kills 12, wounds 31.” Washington Post 6 Nov. 2009, A1+.
Tyson, Ann Scott. “Fort Hood has felt the strain of repeated deployments.” Washington Post 6 Nov. 2009 A8.
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