Muslim, but Presumed Innocent

By Alan Caruba

The earliest indications are that Major Malik Nadal Hasan, the alleged killer of thirteen soldiers who wounded 30 more at Fort Hood, broke under the stress of his forthcoming deployment to Iraq in his capacity as a psychiatrist. Up to the shooting on November 5, he was reportedly doing everything he could to avoid being sent to the Middle East.

Native-born and deemed a good American who enlisted in the U.S. Army, Hasan is the son of Jordanian immigrants and a Muslim. Reportedly, he had encountered some difficulties as the result of that and there are reports, unsubstantiated at this point, that he had posted some thoughts on a personal website regarding his feelings about the role of the U.S. in the Middle East.

If the early news reports are any indication, most will avoid the fact that Major Hasan is a Muslim. Neither CBS Evening News, nor NBC Nightly News in their East Coast feed made any mention of it. As the story continues to develop, it will be instructive to see how the U.S. news media deals with this obvious fact.

On Fox and Friends, Friday morning, it was reported that he shouted “Allah Akbar”, God is great, as he fired at his trapped and helpless victims. There is, in addition, the factor of premeditation.

There are some four to five million Muslims of Arab descent in America, some native born, others who have immigrated. One presumes their patriotism, but there are also too many troubling incidents of these citizens and of converts to Islam to ignore.

Still, nothing—least of all a mass shooting—happens in a vacuum. That is why the November 10th execution of John Allen Muhammad is going to be another occasion for the nation’s media to avoid the fact that he, too, is Muslim. Muhammad, along with Lee Boyd Malvo, were the Beltway snipers who, for three weeks in October 2002, randomly killed ten people and critically wounded three others.

No one is suggesting that all Muslims are killers. What is not being addressed, however, is the way Islam and its holy book, the Koran, is a call to battle.

Starting in 1972, ten members of a local mosque in New York ambushed responding officers, killing one of them. Some fifty-five incidents, including 9/11, have Islam as a component. In the 1970s, adherents of the Nation of Islam, Oakland, California, were particularly active.

As Iran celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the hostage taking of American diplomats, one is reminded of a July 1980 killing in which a political dissident living in Bethesda, Maryland was assassinated in front of his home by an Iranian agent who was an American convert to Islam.

In the 1990s, events began to pick up. In January 1993, for example, a Pakistani with Mujahideen ties gunned down two CIA employees outside its headquarters. In 1997, a Palestinian left an anti-Semitic suicide note behind, went to the top of the Empire State Building, and shot seven people. Events continued apace in the present decade. In March 2000, a local imam gunned down a deputy sheriff in Atlanta and, in Los Angeles, in July 2002, a Muslim killed two people at the Israeli airline counter at the Los Angeles airport.

The 2001 attack on the Twin Towers was Muslim in conception and fulfillment, dependent on the wish for martyrdom by its perpetrators and over three thousand Americans lost their lives.

Honor killings became part of the news stream. In 2004, a Muslim father killed his wife and attacked his two daughters. In 2008, a Muslim father strangled his 25-year-old daughter and this year in Glendale, Arizona, on November 2nd a Muslim father ran over and killed his daughter, fearing she had become too westernized.

Earlier this year, in February, the founder of a Muslim television station beheaded his wife who was seeking a divorce. The manner of the killing is worth noting.

Terrorism experts continue to warn us that some Muslims here in America are engaged in plots to advance jihad. Curiously, the Department of Homeland Security just named two Muslims to top posts. If an American Muslim who rose to the rank of major could commit mass murder, one has to wonder about the wisdom of those choices, admitted to the inner sanctum of the agency charged with protecting the nation.

The signs were there with Major Hasan, but it is likely that the political correctness that infects common sense in America allowed his unhappiness to erupt in a brutal, senseless act.

No religion is exempt from a history of warfare or individual acts of violence, but today’s world is a reminder that of all the killings taking place in the Middle East these days, it is Muslims killing Muslims. Initially spread by warfare, Islam is the newest of the most populous religions of the world and is distinguished by its zeal to impose a global caliphate.

Islam is not a religion of peace. It is a battle plan that divides the world between the world of Islam, Dar al-Islam, and the world of war, Dar al- Harb. Guess which part of the world that puts most of us?