Joan Smith: How can religion not have played a part?
The slaughter of his fellow soldiers by Major Nidal Malik Hasan was the result of a clash between his profession and his faith
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The religion of Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people, has been become the focal point for those trying to decipher his actions
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When Marx described religion as the opium of the people, he was expressing a 19th-century view of the effects of Christianity on the working class. Like many secularists, Marx believed that turning to religion for consolation was both an expression of real suffering and a self-defeating protest against it: hence his analogy with a sedative. In the 21st century, religion is having anything but a sedative effect on people who consider themselves oppressed, and last week's massacre at a US army base highlights the dilemmas posed by militant forms of faith in societies with secular institutions.
Major Nidal Malik Hasan is 39 and an army psychiatrist. He was based first at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC and more recently at Fort Hood, Texas, where he counselled soldiers who have been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was about to be posted to Iraq and his family say he was terrified by the prospect; he tried to get a discharge from the army but failed in an attempt to buy himself out. On Thursday, Hasan took two guns into Fort Hood and opened fire, killing 13 people and wounding 30. He was shot four times by a civilian policewoman, who was herself wounded as they exchanged fire. Hasan was taken to hospital, where he is expected to recover from his injuries.
Major Hasan is a Muslim. As soon as his identity was revealed, his religion became the subject of a ferocious public debate: bloggers claimed the massacre cast doubt on the loyalty of all American Muslims, while commentators on the other side argued that even to consider the role of Hasan's faith was Islamophobic. Both positions are absurd and obstruct the process of unpicking the emotional impact of strongly held religious views on soldiers in Western democracies. In the US army, Hasan would have encountered other soldiers with Muslim backgrounds, but they may have been more secular in outlook, and the majority of his colleagues are likely to have identified themselves as Christians. Some will have been regular churchgoers, but few will have shared either his atavistic views on women or his belief in the necessity of daily religious observance.
According to his family, Hasan encountered hostility because he was a Muslim and because of his Middle Eastern background, especially after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. After seeing so many dreadful combat injuries, it would not be surprising if he feared for his own safety when he was told he was going to Iraq; at the same time, he made no secret of his opposition to both wars and cannot have relished the prospect of being deployed against fellow-Muslims. He seems to have been investigated by the FBI six months ago after expressing support for Islamist suicide-bombers on the internet. But the possibility that some (certainly not all) Muslim soldiers may be experiencing a conflict of loyalties is beginning to be recognised as a potential problem in the British military. The history of Europe demonstrates that Christians don't have many scruples about killing other Christians, but Islamism (which is an ideology as well as a faith) actively seeks to create a common identity and a sense of grievance among Muslims, even though insurgents regularly kill co-religionists in terrorist attacks.
Hasan's actions were denounced in no uncertain terms by mainstream Muslim organisations in the US, and it is clear that most American Muslims have little sympathy with terrorism, despite the efforts of Wahhabi clerics in some cities. It's often forgotten that many Muslims don't go regularly to a mosque, and Hasan stood out precisely because he attended a mosque in Silver Spring, Maryland, so often. An imam who was asked to help him find a wife said that the search was unsuccessful because Hasan's demands were so stringent; he wanted a woman who prayed five times a day, which isn't that common among American Muslims. On Thursday morning, only a few hours before he fired indiscriminately on his fellow-soldiers, Hasan was captured on CCTV in a convenience store wearing traditional white robes and a prayer cap, in contrast to the army fatigues he wore at work. It seems likely that he was not just unable to reconcile these two identities, but came to see them as in violent opposition to each other.
The authorities have launched an urgent investigation into whether Hasan had direct links with extremists, but there is another question that needs to be answered. His faith may have exposed him to verbal abuse, but did it also protect him from being identified as someone with troubling emotional problems? On Friday, a former colleague at Walter Reed said that other medics tried to avoid sending wounded soldiers to Hasan because of his unusual manner and solitary work habits; the picture that began to emerge was of an isolated man who was reluctant to mix with women and expressed overt hostility to the wars in which his comrades were fighting and dying. That should have been sufficient reason for further investigation, and it is reasonable to ask whether secular authorities have the confidence to tell the difference between religious fervour of a kind they're not familiar with and genuinely disturbed behaviour.
None of this is an argument for banning Muslims from the military. Rates of violence, notably domestic violence, are high among men from every background who have returned from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so are cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. Hasan's lethal rampage may be an indicator that it isn't just combat veterans who are vulnerable to PTSD, but it seems likely that the emotional toll of treating wounded soldiers interacted disastrously in his psyche with extreme religious ideas. If Marx were alive today, I think he would acknowledge that the effect of religion can be anything but soporific, even on people who regard themselves as victims of discrimination and stress.
Joan Smith's website is www.politicalblonde.com
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Comments
I realize that many of those policemen at previous mass shootings were merely following orders, so I'd be happy to direct the ridicule at their commanding officers. I hope they're writhing in shame.
You should not blame the religion for what its adherents do; an ancient truth that we seem to recognise of our own religion, but not others.
This sort of act is proscribed by Islam, and viewed with the same sort of horror by the vast majority of moslems as by non-moslems. You lose your qualification to debate with the peaceful majority if you blame their religion.
(C of E) Barnes
Those who do blame islam have to answer the question to why haven't all these terrorist atrocities by muslims happen before, in the 30's or 40's or 50's...when many muslims countries were under Western occupation & rule? It all started in the 70's with the palestinians who wanted to get attention for their mistakes in losing their land.
What that officer did was simply murder in cold blood. There is no religious reason to condone his evil deed. He is a psychiatrist, he shouldn't have let a few ignorant comments by others rile him up, & he wasn't going to fight any muslims in Afghanistan ( or was it iraq), he was going to council soldiers fighting there, so he has no eligible excuse for what he did. He was simply consumed by hatred, unless there is more to it.
For many religious people, their initial encounter with religion was at a very young age; an age at which they were likely to accept what they were told by trusted adults as true. The repetition of certain religious ideas at home, at school, in places of worship, from the media, and from peers, all contribute to religious indoctrination. Some children are predisposed to being more trusting and less questioning; you cannot blame them for that. And is a child to blame for responding to the sticks (the threats of everlasting torture in hell and the like, the punishments for not behaving in accordance with the religion, etc.) and the carrots (heaven, power of prayer, forgiveness, etc.)?
Religious belief can be so deep that facts which contradict the belief are automatically rejected. This puts the believer at a great disadvantage in life. Could this not be described as a form of insanity?
To blame the religion is not just to blame those responsible for formulating the bad parts of a religion, but also to blame those responsible for propagating it. Of course, some of the latter will also have been successfully indoctrinated as children without having recovered later, and so are not truly to blame. But some people complicit in indoctrination are aware of the wrong that they are doing. Those who use religion to gain power, those who use religion to make money, those who use religion to facilitate crimes such as sexual abuse, those clergy who loose their faith but do not want to loose their job, those who feign belief for social advantage, etc. are the villains.
But I expect you will reject my posting on the grounds that in your eyes I loose my qualification to debate. The fact that I disagree with you somehow makes me unqualified to debate?
It is, of course, disturbing that the FBI did not move rapidly after they monitored his Internet postings speaking so positively of suicide bombers. Perhaps they thought this was all just a gimmick to gain an exit from the Army back to the lucrative world of private medicine. However, in view of the fact that the major shouted, "Allah Akbar", as he opened fire killing 13 people and wounding 28, it is difficult to agree with those who would claim that the atrocity had nothing to do with religion.
Much discussion is had about how much the anti-abortion groups to whom these murderers belonged to, knew about the planned killing. Of course, all deny any such knowledge and it is these so-called peace-loving, life-affirming Christians who never seem to express any regret that a person has been killed.
The only difference between the Major's murders and those Christians who kill doctors is numbers. Both believe that their religious faith gives them the duty to kill those who do not believe as they do; this is why religious ideas of so toxic for when taken to their logical conclusion "kill[ing] all the infidels" is the only possible action for a genuine believer.
The answer is simple. Oil, gas and regional control.
1. Approx 65% of the worlds oil and gas is under the feet of Muslims
2. Isreal is surrounded by Muslims
3. 60% of media, law and finance in the USA is controlled by Zionists
4. USA controls the world (at the moment), the CIA has its tentacles all over the place.
Take the above ingredients, put them in a blender and mix throughly. What you get are puppets and selective governments who are dictators in Muslim countries, operating under the umbrella of the USA foreign policies. This situation ensures energy supplies and comfort for Israel, but at a cost to the freedoms for the Muslims.
Then in the 1990's after the end of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, some of the majahadeen (freedom fighters, who were supported by the CIA during the Russian invasion) decided that the invisible control of Muslim lands from the West was unacceptable. They started bombing US military installations and navy.
The CIA named these insurgents al-queda, the majahadeen name was dropped. Al-queda targetted the military for a while. Where they went wrong is when they started to accept civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage like the Nairobi bombing of the US embassy (same kind of thinking as the Americans in WWII when they bombed the Japanese public in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons).
The illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have been quite successful from the US/Israeli point of view. They now control vast reserves of oil and they now have US forces along two of the borders of Iran. Sadly, the UK has brought into this international conflict because of Blairs special "toothpaste sharing" relationship with Bush.
The West (Christians and disbelievers) have been dragged into this situation by the zionists. The Muslims have been asleep for many centuries. But because of these invasions this is situation has changed as more and more of the Muslims become active believers. There will be a period whilst many of these Muslims allow their hatred of the Wests heavy handed approach to overtake their obligations to God and mankind. But in Islam protocols of war are well defined and lets hope that all these Muslims know whats permitted and whats not.
The Taliban are muppets and give Islam a bad name. They enforce their own twisted version of Islam. There are 1.57 billion Muslims and the majority know that the Taliban way is wrong - but with the Taliban being in the media daily, the world sees the Taliban as representing all the Muslims.
Only God knows what the future holds. I cannot envisage any war (at the moment) between Muslims and the West. But for sure, the Muslim nations are significantly reducing their reliance on the West for products, infrastucture and services. They are obtaining these from China, Russia, Korea and Japan. These installed leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan (and else where) will not last too long.
I hope the above answers your question.
Lots of assumptions here but odd that none of the sources seem to actually answer the 2 simple questions posed - did his faith cause him to kill those soldiers? And was that his strategy for getting out of the Iraq tour?
The bottom line to this is that the majority of soldiers refusing to be involved with either iraq or Afghanistan wars will be white Christians. Go figure.
When Anglo-Americans get in a tizz over Islamic fundamentalism, I tell them to sort out their own fundamentalism first, and then we'll take a look at our own.
see this.http://www.wariscrime.com/2008/10/1
His grandfather said,"he takes that gun,everywhere with him".
Will the U.S.military stipulate that all personnel carry a weapon with them from now on?
It does seem strange that another muslim medical professional has taken part in a violent act.