Fort Hood massacre: Why did Hasan snap?

“Every man has his breaking point,” said Erica Goode in The New York Times. For Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist stationed at the Fort Hood base in Texas, that point came last week, shortly before he was supposed to be deployed to Afghanistan. After saying goodbye to his neighbors, giving one a bag of frozen broccoli he said he wouldn’t need anymore, Hasan entered a crowded processing center in the sprawling military base and opened fire with a pair of semiautomatic handguns. Seven minutes later, when Hasan himself was finally gunned down, 12 soldiers and one civilian lay dead, 38 were wounded, and the nation began the all-too-familiar task of trying to divine the meaning of an unfathomable shooting spree. Hasan is still alive, said The Miami Herald in an editorial, despite being shot several times by a courageous police officer who was wounded herself as she stood face to face with him, exchanging fire. But even if Hasan one day chooses to explain himself, we may never fully understand what drove him to this atrocity. “They don’t call it mindless violence for nothing.”

No, but when the shooter yells, “Allahu Akbar!” as he opens fire, said Mark Steyn in the Orange County, Calif., Register, his motives aren’t hard to discern. The liberal media, and even the Army, are now desperately trying to cast Hasan as a troubled loner with murky emotional issues. Anything to draw attention away from the fact that the perpetrator of this latest atrocity is, once again, a devout Muslim waging jihad against America. But the facts speak for themselves. Hasan, it turns out, had posted messages on the Internet praising the courage of suicide bombers. He gave a Powerpoint presentation to fellow officers denouncing the war on terror as a war on Islam. And now we learn, incredibly, that U.S. intelligence agencies had for months been tracking Hasan’s communications with radical Yemeni Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki, but elected to do nothing. Perhaps the military thought Hasan’s support for Islamic terrorists “was just a harmless bit of multicultural diversity.” For more sensible people, the question is why Hasan’s embrace of Islam filled him with such murderous rage, trumping “his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline—his entire American identity.”

But Hasan doesn’t fit the mold of the typical jihadist, said James McKinley in The New York Times. Born in Virginia to Palestinian parents, Hasan joined the U.S. Army over his family’s objections back in 1995, and seemed committed to a career as a military psychiatrist, working to help returning soldiers deal with their war experiences. His family was Muslim, though not particularly observant, and friends say Hasan’s “turn toward Islam” came when he was coping with his parents’ deaths, in 1998 and 2001. During this time, he may have fallen under the influence of the fiery al-Awlaki, who served as an imam at a mosque in Virginia that Hasan attended. By 2004, Hasan was expressing discomfort at being part of a military waging wars in Muslim nations, said Richard Boudreaux in the Los Angeles Times, but he also told relatives he was “haunted by the wartime disabilities” of the soldiers he treated. He was also alienated by the frequent harassment he suffered because of his Muslim faith. One fellow soldier handed him a diaper and told him to wear it as a headdress; another mocked him as a “camel jockey.” An uncle quotes Hasan as saying, “I’m more American than they are. I help my country more than they do.” But eventually, he snapped.

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Don’t blame that snap on Islam, said John Nichols in The Nation. Thousands of Muslims “serve honorably, even heroically, in the U.S. military.” To blame Islam as a whole for the bloodshed in Fort Hood, or to suggest that this shows every Muslim is a terrorist waiting to happen, is both unfair and dangerous. “Fairness is one thing,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, but “foolishness is another.” We should treat the Muslims serving in our military with gratitude, not distrust. But if any soldier, Muslim or Christian, Hindu or atheist, exhibits such obvious symptoms of imminent emotional collapse, the Army has “a duty to act.” If Hasan’s superiors turned a blind eye to his mental unraveling—and his contact with a radical Islamic cleric—out of fear of being branded “Islamophobic,” then some of the blame for this atrocity is theirs.