http://thefishpond.in/thufail-pt/2009/fort-hood-and-islamophobia/
Fort Hood and Islamophobia Tags: fort hood <http://thefishpond.in/tag/fort-hood/>, Islam<http://thefishpond.in/tag/islam/>, media <http://thefishpond.in/tag/media/>, terrorism<http://thefishpond.in/tag/terrorism/>, US <http://thefishpond.in/tag/us/> | No comments<http://thefishpond.in/thufail-pt/2009/fort-hood-and-islamophobia/#respond>| 189 views [image: major] On November 5, 39 year old US army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan Malik entered the Fort Hood army base in the United States with an automatic pistol in his hand and started spraying bullets at the crowded medical processing centre for soldiers serving overseas until being shot by a woman soldier. Thirteen people were killed and thirty wounded. The day after the incident *The Guardian* in UK appeared with the following headline: “Fort Hood army officer shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ before shooting rampage”. By the time the US news broadcaster CNN had begun to air the images that showed Hasan in traditional Muslim clothing, including a prayer cap that it said was taken hours before the killings. (Indian viewers will recollect Delhi police’s act of making the persons arrested on the charges of bomb blasts in 2008 wear kifayah while bringing them to the court. This was in violation of the law that says only black or white mask should be used to cover a culprit’s face). The same day *The Telegraph* reported that Major Malik “had allegedly called for Muslims to attack Americans over the Iraq war”. And *The Washington Post* quoted the staffers of Maj. Malik’s previous posting, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as saying that “he (Maj. Malik) embraced his religion with intensity”. The blog sphere carried even lethal rampages motivated by Islamophobia. Extreme rightist American bloggers like Ralph Peters and Michelle Malkin went further to use the opportunity to annihilate the ‘enemy’. On November 6, even before the investigation moved on its track, Peters declared that “Forthood is 9/11”. He further stated in his blog that “(Maj. Hasan) refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; he had listed his nationality as “Palestinian” in a Muslim spouse-matching program and paraded around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit”. Malkin went even beyond that: “Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hassan is awake and talking on the hospital bed. … Wonder if he asked for a Qur’an yet.” The story went on as the White House ordered an inquiry into the whole incident and the Senate panel and the Pentagon decided to review the matter. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, declared Maj. Malik a “self-radicalised, homegrown terrorist”. Media, meanwhile, began to dig more into the relationships between Maj. Malik and Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical Yemeni American cleric who allegedly propagates terrorism on web. It is noteworthy that although similar incidents happened in the United States in previous years as well there had been no such sensationalism on the culprits’ religion at all. On May 11 this year a US soldier had gunned down five fellow soldiers at a US base in Bangladesh. Even in the cases in which extremist Christians (anti-abortionist, anti-Jew) were involved media kept silent on the religious identity. Also undermined was the fact indicated by a family member of Maj. Malik that “he was just normal, loved sports (and) never got into trouble”. Maj. Malik’s supervisor and colleagues had reiterated, “he wasn’t all that bad a guy”. Some even asked, “If a guy was planning this (attack), do you think he’d be drawing a lot of attention?” People close to him said that there was a lot of evidence to suggest that Maj. Hasan was mentally disturbed. And it was noteworthy (but conveniently forgotten by the western media) that such a thing had happened when the suicide rates and post-traumatic stress disorder hitting record highs in US, especially in the soldiers who returning from battlefields outside the country. Since 2007, more than 70,000 soldiers have been diagnosed with severe psychological trauma – more than 20,000 of them this year alone – according to the US Defence and Veterans Brain Injury Centre. (On the same day of Hassan’s rampage there was another shoot-out in Florida and media only discussed the psychic state of the murderer who killed one and wounded five in an office: “his marriage long ago went sour, home was taken in foreclosure, his job lost to incompetence and his finances sunk in bankruptcy.”) Earlier it was said that “all terrorists are Muslims,” but now it seemed to have been asserted as “all Muslims are terrorists”. The Jewish columnist Jonah Goldberg add onto it by stating that “there’s a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomenon but part of the mainstream Islamic life around the world.” The televangelist Rev. Pat Robertson went further to say that “Islam is a violent — I was going to say religion — but it’s not a religion. It’s a violent political system bent on the overthrow of governments of the world and world domination.” Conservative columnist Cal Thomas bemoans the calamity that the US government “at all levels has hired and promoted Muslims to influential positions. It now requires ‘sensitivity training’ for Federal employees.” Fox News demanded “debriefing” — a euphemism for interrogation — of all Muslims in the US Army. The American Family Association has gone a step further by demanding a total ban on all Muslims in the military. They argued that “the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security.” US President Barrack Obama rightly said that “no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts”. But the Nobel peace prizewinner now has to live up to higher expectations. The man who asserted, in the Cairo speech, his commitment to build a new peaceful relationship with the Muslim world must now act to tackle the right-wing extremists rising rapidly in his country. As *Arab News* succinctly put it in one of their editorials “If Arabs and Muslims are extremists in anything, it is in the patience and tolerance they have shown toward persistent Western portrayal of Islam as being a religion of violence and intolerance”. Bobby Kunhu http://community.eldis.org/myshkin/Blog/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. 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