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Fort Hood officer who killed 11 and wounded 31 was Muslim
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Entrance to Fort Hood (file) (AP Photo/Greg Sharkey)
His name is Malik Nadal Hasan. Today he earned another name: mud. The question still remains: why did he kill 12 people and wound 31?
As everyone knows by now, this massacre happened at Fort Hood, near Killeen, Texas, today beginning at 1:30 p.m. CST (or 1330S, as they say in the Army). Major Malik Nadal Hasan, US Army Medical Corps, walked into the Soldier Readiness Center, the largest and most crowded complex on the largest Army post in the world, and started singling people out and shooting them. Reports aired today on Fox News state that Hasan was deliberately shooting people he knew, right up to the time that a civilian contract police officer wounded him.
Update (November 6): The police officer involved put four rounds into the perpetrator and took one round herself. Happily, she did not die. Unconfirmed reports state that she was still using her cellphone to check up on other personnel while in transit to the hospital.
Now any police officer will vouch that in the overwhelming majority of murder cases, the murderer knew his target(s). The difference is that most murderers will kill only two or three primary targets and occasionally will try to kill any and all witnesses. This killer evidently bore a grudge against forty or more people, and came to the Soldier Readiness Center prepared to kill them all.
But what was the source of that grudge?
The answer to that question seems to depend on the source. First, exactly who he was: he was an Army psychiatrist, originally stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and recently transferred to the post hospital on Fort Hood and scheduled to be deployed to the Iraq theater. Everyone agrees that Major Hasan was Muslim. Most say that he was a recent convert, but his cousin says that he had been a Muslim all his life.
And now, the motive. The cousin says that Major Hasan had taken a great deal of "harassment" over his Muslim faith and his Middle Eastern heritage, and had expressed distress over his pending deployment. But Colonel Terry Lee USA (retired), who once worked with Major Hasan, says that he had expressed sympathy with Abdulhakim Bledsoe, the suspect in the shooting at a Little Rock, AR, recruiting office last summer, and even said that "it's about time that Muslims stood up against the aggressors," and words to similar effect. This officer further states that Hasan had had similar arguments with several people, on such themes as whether Muslim should fight Muslim. (Furthermore, Col. Lee says that no one ever "harassed" Hasan or called him any racial names. Hasan, not any of the others, started those arguments.)
So perhaps--just perhaps--Hasan suddenly decided, on his own, to kill all those people whom he had had arguments with.
This raises another issue: Muslims in this country have never once faced up to such spectacles as honor killings (like the killing of Noor Faleh Almaleki in Arizona by her father on October 20) and the "fighting words" in the Qu'ran:
Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
Hasan's action today is the second such action in less than half a year. He also drew a moral from the first attack, and said so to a fellow officer.
Coincidence? Here is what Ian Fleming once said about things like that:
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time it's enemy action.
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