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Latest Updates: Nidal Hasan RSS

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  johnpi 8:34 am on January 22, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Fort Hood attack (59), Nidal Hasan, political correctness (5)

  The US army’s report on the Fort Hood shooting is being used as fodder for the right-wing’s attack on ‘political correctness’ because it does not mention Nidal Hasan or Islam by name.

  “The report demonstrates that we are unwilling to identify and confront the real enemy of political Islam,” says a former military colleague of Hasan, speaking privately because he was ordered not to talk about the case. “Political correctness has brainwashed us to the point that we no longer understand our heritage and cannot admit who, or what, the enemy stands for.”

  The authors have defended the report, saying that the focus of their investigation was ‘actions and consequences not motivations.’

  Mark Lynch wrote about the broader right-wing response earlier:

  A lot of people — some well-meaning, some clowns or worse — evidently want the American response to the Ft. Hood shootings to revive the post-9/11 “war of ideas” and “clash of civilizations” anti-Islamic discourse. It’s a jihad, they shout, demanding careful scrutiny of the loyalty of American Muslims. That’s what they seem to mean by the demand to throw away “political correctness” and confront the ideological menace. The overall effect of their recommendations, however, would be to revive the flagging al-Qaeda brand and to greatly strengthen the appeal of its narrative. And that’s exactly what we should not want.

   

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  johnpi 10:59 am on January 1, 2010 | 8 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: hypocrisy (6), Malik Nidal Hasan (6), Nidal Hasan, Nidal Malik Nasan (27), vigilantes (13), vigilantism (7), violence (161)

  Womb weapon in hand, Umar sez Brother Nidal Hasan had good intentions but made a bad choice.

  If only we could find it in our hearts to extend such gentle, loving reprimands and murmurs of disapproval to our American government for its bad choices.

   
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  buzz 4:48 pm on November 21, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Fort Hood attack (59), Global War on Terror (7), Malik Nidal Hasan (6), muslim american extremism (25), Nidal Hasan, Terrorism (399)

  Well written and thoughtful OpEd piece in the NY Times.

  …It’s true that Major Hasan was unbalanced and alienated — and, by my lights, crazy. But what kind of people did conservatives think were susceptible to the terrorism meme? 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. That’s why the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy — a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims — is so dubious…

  Full article.

   
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  abunoor 6:06 pm on November 17, 2009 | 5 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Evanglical Christians in the Military, Mikey Weinstein, Nidal Hasan, religious freedom (20)

  Mikey Weinstein (who apparently is most known for advocating for Jewish members of the U.S. armed forces) of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is calling for investigation into reports that Nidal Hasan was harassed over his religion and ethnicity in the military.

  Weinstein, who spent 10 years in the Air Force as a military attorney, or JAG, said he also doesn’t believe reports that Hasan’s colleagues hesitated to report his changes in behavior because of political correctness. In fact, he claimed, Hasan’s superiors would have been sympathetic to hearing such charges because of their strong Christian beliefs.

  Weinstein would like to see military leaders make an “unadulterated clarion call” that Americans shouldn’t “paint all of Islam with a broad brush” and emphasize a “zero tolerance policy” of any religious harassment.

  A 1977 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, from where his two sons and daughter-in-law also have graduated, Weinstein argues that Jews, Muslims and most members of the military who are not an evangelical Christian face a hostile environment from what he says are “fundamentalist Christians” who dominate the armed forces and are constantly trying to proselytize others.

   
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  johnpi 7:33 am on November 13, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Extremism (167), Fort Hood attack (59), media (408), Nidal Hasan, Nidal Malik Nasan (27), Terrorism (399), US media (17)

  Time magazine: Nidal Hasan marks ‘a whole new terrorism war.’

  Weekly news magazines like Time and Newsweek, which each have a circulation of between 3 and 4 million, can’t ‘break’ news stories because they are weekly, so their coverage tends to be more like what is called ’second-day coverage’ where they are offering analysis, predictions, repercussions, the ‘bigger picture,’ etc. Both Time and Newsweek have become much more conservative in orientation through the 1980s and 1990s.

  For eight years, Americans have waged a Global War on Terrorism even as they argued about what that meant. The massacre at Fort Hood was, depending on whom you believed, yet another horrific workplace shooting by a nutcase who suddenly snapped, or it was an intimate act of war, a plot that can’t be foiled because it is hatched inside a fanatic’s head and leaves no trail until it is left in blood. In their first response, officials betrayed an eagerness to assume it was the first; the more we learn, the more we have cause to fear it was the second, a new battlefield where our old weapons don’t work very well and our values make us vulnerable: freedom, privacy, tolerance and the stubborn American certainty that people born and raised here will not reject the gifts we share.

  Even as the President weighs how to fight the wars he inherited, he and the entire U.S. security apparatus will have to figure out how you fight a war against an enemy you can’t recognize, much less understand. In that sense, the war on terrorism has left the battlefield and moved to the realm of the mind.

  This an excerpt to the main story in what appears to be “package coverage” with a number of sidebars and smaller stories linked off of it.

   
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  johnpi 11:21 am on November 12, 2009 | 6 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Extremism (167), FBI (46), muslim american extremism (25), Nidal Hasan, Nidal Malik Nasan (27), Terrorism (399)

  The very right-wing Washington Times is reporting that FBI sources are telling them that Nidal Malik Hasan was in contact with other people identified as Islamic extremists besides al-Awlaki, who are located in both the US and overseas.

  Maj. Hasan made some of the contacts while visiting known jihadist chat rooms on the Internet, according to one of The Times’ sources, a senior FBI official. He said that several people with whom Maj. Hasan was in contact had been the focus of investigations by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force.
  ….

  Both officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said some of the names of those with whom Maj. Hasan was in contact will likely be released soon.

  The FBI official said that could happen during pending congressional hearings into the massacre.

  A military intelligence official adds:

  “Those connections, except for Awlaki, could be explained innocently. But all of them together form a very concerning picture.”

  “I may run into contact with shady people through coincidence, through social events, etc.,” he said. “But at some point you start saying like, ‘Huh? Why are you coming in contact with all these charming people?’ “

  Sometimes the Washington Times does journalism, so this is worth noting.

   
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  mirelle 7:29 am on November 12, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Muslim psychiatrists (2), Nidal Hasan

  National Public Radio is reporting that Maj. Nidal Hasan may have been suspected of being psychotic at least two years ago, but that cumbersome dismissal processes (in place at virtually every hospital across the country, not just the military) made it difficult to dismiss him.

  “Put it this way,” says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. “Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole.”

   
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  buzz 3:05 pm on November 10, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  Tags: Barack Obama (77), Fort Hood attack (59), Nidal Hasan

  Are you a JAFI? (Just Another F*cking Islamophobe)

  This page is dedicated to you.

  

  Your opinions are treasured. Thank you!

   
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  johnpi 7:15 am on November 10, 2009 | 18 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anti-muslim (15), anti-Muslim fearmongering (41), anti-Muslim propaganda (27), Fort Hood attack (59), islamophobia (228), Nidal Hasan, Nidal Malik Nasan (27)

  A Hindu writer at Forbes magazine has coined a new term he hopes catches on: ‘Going Muslim’ a play on a term that has existed in American popular culture for awhile, ‘Going postal.’

  “Going postal” is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker–archetypically a postal worker–”snaps” and guns down his colleagues.

  As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub–disconcertingly–”Going Muslim.” This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

  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.

  The writer, Tunku Varadarajan, goes on to complain about ‘political correctness,’ as so many other articles of this ilk have.

   
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  johnpi 11:26 pm on November 9, 2009 | 8 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Fort Hood attack (59), Nidal Hasan, Nidal Malik Nasan (27), Salafis (17), salafism (24), salafists (14), Ummah (12), wahhabi (7), Wahhabis (9), wahhabism (14)

  Asra Nomani has discovered a man who attends the Silver Springs, MD Muslim Community Center who said he had many, many conversations with Nidal Malik Hasan about religious topics.

  …a closer look behind the doors of the mosque and inside the conversations between the engineer and the doctor reveal a more complex picture of a young first-generation American Muslim man living a life of dissonance between his identity as an American and his ideology as a Muslim who had accepted a literal, rigid interpretation of Islam, akin to the puritanical Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam that define the theology of militancy inside the Muslim world today, according to community members who knew Hasan.

  Along the way of reporting and describing the two men’s conversations, Nomani has a critique of the common use of the word “ummah” among some in the Muslim world today.

  It’s critical that we ditch the concept of the “ummah” with a capital “U” and recognize that we are an “ummah” with a small “u,” meaning our religious identity doesn’t have to supersede other loyalties and identities. This attempt to push an “Ummah” is the politics of ideologues of puritanical Islam who want to mollify dissent. Sadly, too many moderates have bought into it. We aren’t monolithic, and we shouldn’t try to be. Look at al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistani militant groups: They don’t have a problem with killing Muslims, slaying Muslims in attacks from Amman, Jordan, to Islamabad, Pakistan.

   
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  abunoor 5:59 pm on November 9, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anwar al-awlaki (25), Dar ul Hijrah, Nidal Hasan

  Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, outreach director for Dar ul Hijrah Mosque in Falls Church, VA gave a press conference today:

  FALLS CHURCH, Va. — The outreach director for the northern Virginia mosque where the suspected Fort Hood shooter sometimes attended prayer services says Maj. Nidal Hasan was not an active member.
  Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah (dahr al-HIDJ’-ruh) Islamic Center in Falls Church also is denouncing statements from a radical American imam living in Yemen who praised Hasan as a hero on his personal Web site Monday.
  Abdul-Malik says the imam, Anwar al Awlaki (OW’-lahk-ee), was employed by the mosque from January 2001 to April 2002.
  Abdul-Malik says staff members observed Hasan attend prayer services occasionally at the mosque following his mother’s death in 2001. He says they noticed Hasan being “disoriented” and distant.