A lot of Americans think Islam is an evil religion. That's a good start; now if we can just get them to see that Christianity and Judaism are evil too, we'd really be making progress. "Allahu akbar!" is what Major Nidal Malik Hasan may have shouted as he killed thirteen people at Ft. Hood, but it doesn't translate to "Allah is great," as many American media reports had it. That's only a half translation. What Major Hasan declared was, "God is great!" -- something most Americans enthusiastically agree with. Hasan committed an atrocity because he believed that an imaginary character was compelling him to do so.
Major Hasan, like many dogmatic religious people, saw a world of absolutes: God is great, you will be rewarded or punished after you die, etc. He didn't want to be deployed to the Middle East, because he didn't want to fight against fellow-Muslims. Presumably, he would have been willing to fight people of another religious denomination. He was willing to kill thirteen of his fellow soldiers in Texas. It's a typical religious attitude: Us versus them, the chosen people versus the infidels; some lives are more valuable than others; nothing is more important than God. The problem with this, of course, is that as far as anyone can tell, there is no God -- and that leaves it up to people to make up their own crazy ideas about what God wants.
As with the 9/11 attacks, the media has failed to properly identify the Ft. Hood rampage as a religious assault upon a secular institution. But that's by no means the only missed angle in the coverage. We're so fixated on the fact that Hasan is a Muslim that we've nearly overlooked something more important: Hasan is an American military officer. So in addition to Christian jihadists (skinheads and neo-Nazis), our armed forces include Muslim jihadists. If Major Hasan was capable of this act, then a great deal of what we are told about our military and the men and women who serve is very, very wrong. Anyone who believes there's not much of a difference between "our" killers and "their" killers can regard the Ft. Hood massacre as evidence that soldiers, regardless of the side they seem to be on or the cause they seem to fight for, are all the same. People plus guns equals death. If Hasan had been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, he could have committed the exact same massacre, against different victims, and been hailed as a great American hero.
Our military, at least in part, consists of scared, emotionally ravaged, physically brutalized young people, many of whom enlisted out of a sense of hopelessness (easy to come by in this economy). They are asked not only to endure horrifying physical risk ("in harm's way" is the standard line), but to grapple with sociological and geopolitical realities almost nobody understands. Americans are quick to declare their alleged "support" for "our troops," and politicians love to describe the military as the finest people in the world. But behind all that patronizing talk is obvious disregard, and even contempt. A new study indicates that more than 2,200 American veterans died last year -- not because of IEDs, but because they don't have health insurance. Imagine surviving an unspeakable nightmare in a foreign land, getting home, and dying because of our insurance system. Imagine preparing for an unspeakable nightmare, and then being gunned down in Texas by one of your compatriots. Yes, something is very wrong with Major Nidal Hasan, but we shouldn't let that obscure the larger truth: Something is very wrong with our military, and its prolonged engagement in unnecessary and unwinnable conflicts.
But wait -- there's guns. Since we're obviously missing the religious and military implications of Ft. Hood, I'm sure we're going to miss the gun implications. Hasan did not use a military-issued weapon to kill thirteen and wound thirty-eight. Hasan used an FN-5.7, sometimes known as the "cop killer" gun, which he purchased legally and easily at a store in Killeen, Texas called Guns Galore. So now that Islamic jihadists (who are also American soldiers) are using America's insanely permissive gun laws to purchase weapons to murder American soldiers, all the demented NRA people will just be quiet from now on, right?
Yesterday, at the Ft. Hood memorial service, President Obama disappointingly flavored his speech with religious dogma right out of the Koran or the Bible: "For what he has done," the President said, "we know that the killer will be met with justice, in this world, and the next." Whoa, there, sir. As far as anyone can tell, there is no next world, and for an American President to perpetuate religious mythology is a major misstep. (We expected it from the last guy, because he was, you know, an idiot. Obama lacks this convenient excuse.) As for this world, whether or not Hasan is punished for his crime, it won't be undone -- nor will the crime of "D.C. sniper" John Muhammed, who was executed last night; his victims remain dead. But until our culture sheds its tragic obsessions with God and guns, these atrocities will continue to accumulate. At the memorial service, how were the fallen represented? Like this:
Where once there were human beings, now there are only guns.
