Writing for Forbes in reaction to Nidal Malik Hasan’s alleged terror attack against the soldiers at Fort Hood and the knee-jerk reaction of the FBI and media to declare the incident “not terrorism” before any facts were known, Tunku Varadarajan suggests we’re starting to see a new phenomenon: Going Muslim.
It’s kind of like “Going Postal,” but with a purpose. Stripping off the mask of assimilation to reveal the inner Jihadi that always lurked just underneath.
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
A short time after the shootings at Fort Hood, President Obama asked us not to jump to conclusions. To many Americans, this was a grating request, of a piece with the political correctness that was responsible–it has emerged–for the hands-off treatment by the Army of Maj. Hasan. How else could he have been left in the position of treating U.S. troops, given the stories we’ve now heard about his incendiary statements and apparent incompetence?
This is the same mindset that led the FBI to deny the possibility that the Fort Hood massacre was linked to terrorism even before they could have had any idea that was the case. We don’t have to be paranoid about Arab males; we just have to avoid the opposite: Being fearful of coming across as Islamophobic, and thereby failing to look straight at a situation.
Meanwhile, on the apologist left, Time Magazine suggests that “Secondary Trauma;” being so traumatized by hearing other people’s war stories that he was driven to mass murder, was the driving force behind the attack during which Hasan repeatedly cried “Allahu Akbar.”
I guess, as edit35 points out in comments here, Hasan having frequented the same fundamentalist mosque as some of the 9/11 terrorists has nothing to do with his subsequent terror attack on US military forces.
“So many time I talked with him,” said Akhter, a community leader who is sort of like a mosque gadfly, challenging congregants to reject literal, rigid interpretations of Islam. “I was trying to modernize him. I tried my best. He used to hate America as a whole. He was more anti-American than American.”
Despite all the conversations, Akther said, “I couldn’t get through to him. He was a typical fundamentalist Muslim.”
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