Hasan Didn't "Snap." He Was a Jihadi

Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal today has a bracing piece about the almost surreal disconnection between what’s increasingly clear about the Ft. Hood killer, Maj. Nidal Hasan, and what officials and some commentators seem unable to acknowledge. As she writes: “It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.” She quotes Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. as saying, “"This terrible event would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty." As Mona Charen points out, the idea of a witch hunt is false and dangerous. Surely the general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the military, we embrace fanatics in our midst. Rooting them out has to be to the benefit of the brave, patriot Muslims who serve. Ralph Peters makes the larger point that, “By protecting the fanatics, we betray the peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and communities.”

According to a medical school classmate, Hasan repeatedly expressed seditious views and—in violation of his military oath—said, “I hold the Shariah, the Islamic Law, before the United States Constitution." Hasan had no problem loudly proclaiming his enemy is the United States. But for many it’s more comfortable to look away from his religious beliefs for an alternate theory of why he “snapped,” instead of saying our enemy is militant Islam. Rabinowitz ends chillingly: “It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.”

Tags: ft hood, jihad, militant Islam, nidal hasan

Emily Yoffe is Slate's Dear Prudence and Human Guinea Pig (emilyyoffe@hotmail.com)

Comments

Glad to see it said in print.

By: LJ | Sun, 11/22/2009 - 02:28

I'm commenting anonymously for a variety of reasons, and a little nervous now, too because this topic (and people's blindness to the realities we are facing) tends to put me on edge.

Emily, I have read you advice columns in the past, and recognized your name and Hasan's while clicking through this site. I absolutely and completely agree with you and support your brave statement to the facts on this matter. I think it's a terrible thing that you expressing an "opinion" has to be considered brave, but it is. I am a veteran, worked as an Arabic linguist for 7 years in the military. I specialized in militant Islam then and am continuing my research on Islam and the global jihad for my Masters degree (will be continuing to a doctorate). Hasan is very clearly a jihadist. I can agree with dissenters that he was also a middle aged man, failing at so many of life's tasks. He may have also had some mental issues (depression from being a failure perhaps?). But that does not lessen the fact that he was a jihadist. This is one of the many forms that jihadists come in. This doesn't mean Tim McVeigh wasn't a terrorist, or that Cho didn't also cause carnage. However, this is an example of jihad. I wish people would look at the facts and learn the patterns. And no, I'm not a right-winger; I'm fairly liberal, actually. However, I *love* my country; I swore to protect and defend our rule of law against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So any perp on this soil that values Sharia law over the constitution needs to be booted out of this country as soon as possible.

I am so grateful and proud of you that you had the courage to speak the truth. So, thank you. The only way we are going to defeat militant Islam is by getting the word out what jihad looks like, one step, one person and one posting at a time.

Offensive Racist Claptrap, Anyone?

By: Lisa Mims | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 10:45

Assume, if you will, that Hasan did say, "I place Sharia law before the law of the United States." How many of us have heard observant Catholics, Baptists or Orthodox Jews say something similar? "No law before God's law" is the phrase, I believe.

That doesn't mean he was on a jihad. He is a mentally unbalanced psychiatrist who should never have been issued a gun. The fault here is with the military's ability to identify a crazy person, nothing more.

Reading things like this, I'm wondering when Americans will wake up to the fact that we already incarcerated the Japanese in WWII, that we already incarcerate illegal aliens from Mexico in huge jail facilities, and that Americans have done enough to endanger themselves abroad with foam-at-the-mouth idiocies like this--there is a reason they hate us.

You make me deeply ashamed to be an American.

Sigh

By: LJ21983 | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 09:38

Wow, really disappointed to see this column coming from someone with whom I agree almost all of the time. You take the (dubious) claim that he admitted to holding Sharia law over the Constitution and translate that to mean that he "loudly proclaim(ed)" that the US was his enemy, but that's taking a lot of license with a story that may not even be true. To use a flippant example: I cheer for the Pittsburgh Steelers over the Carolina Panthers, but that doesn't make the Panthers my enemy (football team). Plus, as someone else wisely remarked below, if we're going to make sure that, when push comes to shove, our soldiers aren't placing religious law over Constituional law, I think you'll be surprised with how many soldiers of all faiths would be new-found "enemies" of the United States.

Also, unless evidence to the contrary appears, Hasan should not be considered a jihadi. I do think this is fairly considered a terrorist act, as it was violence perpetrated for political motives (though since they were combatants, the terrorism moniker can be easily debated). That being said, this does not seem to have been a part of the wider Islamist global Islamist movement. So, basically you're just sh*+-stirring on that one, which, again, is disappointing because I'd always thought you were more, er... prudent than that.

Thank you posters...

By: nagatuki | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 09:11

It's nice that readers are more astute than Yoffe and, indeed, many in the media, at really analyzing what happened and not jumping to an easy explanation.

We have many single-person acts of violence in this country and we don't go on about each person's religious beliefs unless they happen to be Muslim.
~~~~~~
It's particularly interesting that he went to VA Tech, the site of the worst civilian attack in recent history, and yet it still doesn't make people even hesitate to question whether he was just mentally unstable as Cho was because, unlike Cho, Hassan also happens to be Muslim.
~~~~~~~
I'm sorry, but citing a "classmate" isn't enough to convict him, nor are some emails from 5 months ago. If and when the government proves its case against him and it shows a _real_ religious connection, I'll go with it. Until then, the media should stop convicting him before he even gets to court.

Jihadi Fact

By: Alex001 | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 08:58

I think Hasan is Jihadi .He had no problem loudly proclaiming his enemy is the United States.This shows that he is a Jihadi.
PhotoBooth

The Wrong Emily

By: bobbydee | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 08:52

Ah the vapid, disingenuous conservatism of Emily Yoffe. Isn't there another Emily at XX who might actually have something intelligent to add to this issue?
This post was initially titled "Was Hasan a Terrorist?" but the answer, in the affirmative, to that question is taken for granted here. But we are without, still, any evidence that Hasan's rampage was linked to any sort of organized group activity. Furthermore — and this is important — it's highly questionable whether or not we can consider an attack on a military base "terrorism." Doesn't terrorism, by Hoyle, indicate the targeting of civilians? Those targeted were not only non-civilians but, according to reports, they were preparing to be deployed to a war. This, of course, doesn't mitigate the heinousness of Hasan's crime, but it does make way for an easy sniff test for those who are despicably eager to politicize this affair with a dearth of facts.

I keep seeing these "did he

By: Katie27again | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 07:47

I keep seeing these "did he snap or was he a terrorist" posts and I find it a little bit disingenuous (David Brooks in NYT yesterday especially) to call this a terrorist attack. Come on, I know people are capable of being more rational than this. What are we talking about when we're talking about "terrorism?" Such lone-gun violence happens all the time here in the US. I think for the sake of rational argument, we best keep the "terrorism" charges confined to the institutional/organizational efforts of certain groups (Al Queda, for example). Even if all the speculation and anecdotal evidence of his infidel-hating were true, so what? His "attack" was not part of any organized effort to disrupt/terrorize/bring down--and this seems to be what cooler heads are recognizing. It seems just plain wrong to categorize a factually random act of violence (insofar as it was not part of any organized plan) as "terrorism" simply because one lunatic's "reasons" coincide with a terrorist group's "reasons." From the point of view of gun-violence in the US, it looks like yet another helpless, angry male with a gun and an axe to grind. Seeing it as anything more than that is cynically political--a reactionary conserative inclination to remind all the bleeding hearts that "the threat against us - from Islamofascism - is real!" Please. How about the threat of the increasingly disenfranchised, angry, hateful men with easy access to guns? If I were to call the murder of an abortion provider right wing "terrorism" the same conservatives who would like to use the Ft. Hood shooting to further their political cause would accuse me of being an America-hating hysterical liberal. I would, in fact, not be taken very seriously by anyone outside of the extreme left. I understand that collectively we will continue to define "terrorism" almost exclusively as that which is other (ie: middle-eastern), and perhaps that is unavoidable and pragmaitic, as a matter of national security. (I won't mention Timothy McVeigh here, just to keep it simple.) However, as a matter of national security, the Ft. Hood incident was in no way quantifiably or qualitatively different than Columbine. David Brooks got one thing right yesterday: We have a choice of narrative. I'm just not sure to what end we make Ft. Hood part of a narrative of Islam v. The West. Oh wait, I'm perfectly sure of what end we make Ft. Hood a narrative about Islam v. The West.

on being judicious

By: Westman | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 02:22

I'm disappointed in this post, as it comes from somebody who's normally so judicious.

Many people are dead, and we need to know why. But what we're hearing now from "classmates" of Hasan may or may not be true. They may or may not be classmates. Other classmates may have very different memories of the same events. None of the "testimony" discovered by the Washington Post or Fox News is under oath, and these are after all the same news media that led us down the primrose path straight into a war over weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Recall that at Columbine, what seemed so startlingly clear during the immediate aftermath turned out to be completely untrue. There was no "trenchcoat mafia." The killers were not part of a larger conspiracy. They did not single out Christians.

I will not be surprised to learn that much of what we "know" at this stage turns out to be wrong. But by then, will we have acted on this "knowledge" in such a way as to undercut our own efforts to advance democracy and push extremism to the margins?

failure to solve a small problem led to a big problem

By: dontthinkso | Tue, 11/10/2009 - 22:27

Honestly, I wouldn't classify him as a jihadi just because he was actively trying to get out of the army. If they had let him out like he tried and tried to get them to do then he wouldn't be shooting anyone.
Not only did he try directly by telling them, but I wouldn't be surprised if his poor performance evaluations and vocal disagreements with the war were purposely to convince them that he didn't belong in the army.

I do not think of terrorism when thinking about this incident because this act doesn't create terror after the fact. It is just an unbelievably horrible incident that seems like it could easily have been prevented, unlike terrorism, which causes fear afterwards because people know that it is actually difficult to prevent someone from hurting you if they really want to.

It is offensive the way Dr. Phil uses the word victim for him after what he did and the choices he made to shoot all those people and make everyone else on the base feel victimized even if they weren't shot. But it is also offensive the way Dorothy Rabinowitz implies that this is such a clear act of anti-american terrorism that anyone that does not arrive at that same conclusion is either being overly sensitive to offending Muslim people or is so "far out of touch with reality" that they are "immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting", as if they are blind and illogical and have a desire to defend this murderer. That is offensive and unfair.

My view is that people that don't fit in are capable of going to violent extremes, but they try to get help or get away from the bad situation first, like this guy did. But being trapped logically leads to people either hurting themselves or hurting others. I read a study once that said that people with too low self-esteem will hurt themselves, and people with too high self-esteem hurt others. Maybe that is how this killer made his choice. If he had too low self-esteem, he would have killed himself and we wouldn't be having any discussion on terrorism.

A person with normal self-esteem like me sees two alternatives, but different ones:
1) keep refusing and trying to get them to let me out of the army and violate laws by not showing up for duty, or
2) go and just hope that I live even if none of the other soldiers care about me.

But if I had to fight with the Nazi army (if I was a boy and not a girl), my self-esteem would go really low and I'd kill myself before killing any innocent Jewish people. I give up pretty easily when I'm trapped.

Also, I think that someone has to be crazy to do what he has done to his family. Their lives will be very difficult, I can't even imagine.

religious law before the constitution

By: xx-reader | Tue, 11/10/2009 - 22:06

So Hasan was on record as saying that he holds Shariah, or Islamic law, before the constitution. Aside from the question of whether this man was all there mentally (he seemed a little unstable; no Mohammed Atta), allowing this sort of thing certainly seems a bad idea, doesn't it? I wonder how many officers and enlisted men and women in our armed forces hold the Bible, or what they consider as Christian law, above the Constitution? If we don't consider this a problem too, then we have erased the line between church and state. It seems that the inculcation of Christian culture in the military has become commonplace. Recent reports confirmed that Dept of Defense briefings to GWB even included Bible verses on the cover pages. I find myself as afraid that those in the military who hold Biblical teaching above the Constitution might distort their missions in Muslim countries, understanding them as an opportunity to win the region for Christ with all the destabilization that implies for US interests as I am of future attacks of jihadist elements in the military. Indeed, the Christians are probably in positions of much greater power to allow their beliefs to influence their missions than are Muslim Americans in the military. I would prefer that the men and women keeping my country safe swear primary allegiance to the Constitution. If they are not prepared to do that, they should choose another profession.