On November 17, twelve days after the Fort Hood shooting, the Muslim Student Association of NYU organized a protest to voice its opposition to a column published by Forbes Opinion editor and NYU Stern Professor Tunku Varadarajan. In said article Varadarajan argues that Hasan’s actions were a case of an individual “Going Muslim,” a phrase meant to recall the oft caricatured (think Newman from Seinfeld) image of the frustrated postal worker who one day decides to bring a gun to work an gun down his colleagues. One passage in particular has raised the ire of Muslim groups across the nation:
“The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage–the camouflage of integration–in an act of revelatory catharsis.”
Varadarajan goes on to argue that such behavior simply confirms the fact that certain groups of people (i.e. Muslims) pose greater security threats than, let’s say, elderly women, and that we ought to replace our facade of political correctness with a more pragmatic approach calculated based on the danger posed by a specific group. It is our desire to appear equal, he continues, that contributed to the Army’s inaction in the face of ample evidence of Hasan’s extremist views.
But why should the extra scrutiny be directed only towards Muslims, considering that this pretense could be used to justify discrimination against any minority group?
“Muslims are the most difficult “incomers” in the ongoing integration challenge, which America has always handeled with pride– and a kind of swagger. We’re a kind of salad bowl/melting pot. Drive through Queens to see how we do this.”
However, demographic studies of Muslim immigrants in the US indicate that we are doing quite well. For example, they enjoy high levels of education and their average income levels are well above the national average, forming a stark contrast with Muslim immigrants in Western Europe who suffer from astronomical unemployment rates and often live in poor urban areas isolated from the communities at large. Europe’s inability to integrate Muslim populations came to a head in 2005 when the perpetrators of the subway attacks in London were found to be “homegrown.” Prior to Major Hasan’s rampage, America had yet to suffer from such an attack at the hands of one of the millions of American-Muslims who currently live and work here.
And unlike the London bombers who explicitly voiced their discontent with Western injustices in the Muslim world, Major Hasan, while he does to have been pushed over the edge by the stories he heard about Iraq and Afghanistan, also had a plethora of personal psychological issues that made him highly susceptible to an ideology that would give him a justification for carrying out such an attack. Though it is important to confront the facets of any ideology that could conceivably serve to justify violence, this is up to the true adherents of the ideology to deal with. In his recent op-ed for the NYT, Robert Wright argues that
”Like all viruses, terrorism infects people with low resistance. And surely Major Hasan isn’t the only American Muslim who, for reasons of personal history, has become unbalanced and thus vulnerable. Any religious or ethnic group includes people like that, and the post-9/11 environment hasn’t made it easier for American Muslims to keep their balance.”
In other words, we should allow ourselves to completely medicalize Hasan’s crimes, but we should also not attempt to paint him as a another calculating Muslim terrorist carrying out the pan-Muslim goal of destroying the West. That would only give further impetus to Al-Qaeda and far-right at home to turn the war on terror into a war on Islam, a shift in framework which would be beneficial to both groups. Instead, we ought to temper our approach with an analysis of which factors in particular lower the resistance of these individuals to the point where they are willing to carry out such crimes at the price of their own lives. Wright continues:
“contrary to right-wing stereotype, Islam isn’t an intrinsically belligerent religion. Still, this sort of stereotyping won’t go away, and it’s among the factors that could make homegrown terrorism a slowly growing epidemic. The more Americans denigrate Islam and view Muslims in the workplace with suspicion, the more likely the virus is to spread — and each appearance of the virus in turn tempts more people to denigrate Islam and view Muslims with suspicion. Whenever you have a positive feedback system like this, an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope.”
So where does that leave us? The blame, as far as I can tell, lies with three parties. First and foremost with Hasan, who committed a grievous crime and ought to be punished to the fullest extent regardless of his psychological issues. Second, the blame lies with the Army and the FBI, organizations that must undergo some serious soul-searching and find out why no one had the wherewithal to report Hasan when he was giving powerpoint presentations to other soldiers in which he seemed to justify extremist ideology, a problem justly pointed out by Varadarajan in his column. And finally, some blame must fall on our culture, its citizens, and the institutions that shape it. We are a pluralistic society in which individuals must accept the authority of civil law even if it means subjugating some of their personal beliefs. The fact that we did nothing in the face of ample evidence, presumably because the powers that be were afraid of giving ammunition to those fringe groups who want nothing more than evidence of terrorists in our midst so that they may immeasurably increase the scope of the current war, the more likely it becomes that individuals like Major Hasan will commit these crimes and end up giving credence to the fringe world-view anyway.
