then why havent there been more base shootings until now?
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then why havent there been more base shootings until now?
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Now, that is very, very perceptive, aziz.
It could be DOD security failure or maybe DOD security success.
Let’s ask Kevin, okay, he seems to be the go to guy at the moment.
Aziz,
How about we keep comments to posts in the threads for that post?
Or do you want me to start making a front page post to comment on everyone of your posts?
What number of shootings is “enough” to prove it? And is one shy of that number proof that it isn’t?
That seems to be McK’s position.
And that it didn’t happen sooner seems to prove Islam has no connection to the killing ether according to Aziz.
Fantastic.
chad, thats a valid question. I think that the argument for whether “it” was Islam relies on assertions that guarantee that the number would be greater than 1 for as long as there are sizable numbers of muslims in the military. In fact, if there are N muslims in the military, then the number of sch incidents would have to be… N. If those who argue that “it” was indeed Islam are correct, that is.
What does whether or not this attack was Islam have to do with how many attacks might have taken place? I would think there haven’t been more attacks like this because most Muslims don’t share these sorts of feelings or attitudes. I imagine most Muslims just want to live in peace and go about their lives.
I don’t think you mean that many or most Muslims in America share the attacker’s feekings and attitudes, so why would you think that him basing his attacks on Islam has any bearing on the behaviors of others who follow Islam?
Jay, thats exactly right. The actions of Hasan have no bearing on the beliefs of muslims, only on the beliefs of Hasan. And yet there are those who argue that Hasan was driven to do what he did because of Islam, and thus all muslims are automatically suspect. Thats the argument I am trying to refute with my rather simple, yet logically rigorous, question in this post.
That seems to be McK’s position.
Kevin, you well know that I’ve stated more than once to you that I don’t have a position. I only asked you to defend yours. You haven’t done it. My question was:
So what evidence based facts can you present to justify YOUR STATEMENT of sobering DOD failures to protect military personnel?
You’ve merely stated — go elsewhere.
McK,
I’m not having this discussion on two threads. Indeed this post should never have been made as it is in direct response to my post and therefore belongs in the comments section of that post.
What if most muslims living in the US – like, I suspect, most christians – are bad muslims? (Bad meaning not devout.)
JohnW – good logical question. To answer, muslims in the US span teh complete range from “progressive” to traditionalist to salafist. Nearly all however have managed to reconcile modernity with faith. Im not just talking about my own Bohra sect but pretty much the vast majority of all arab, asian, and african muslims in the US tend towards social conservatism and traditional values. However, the spread is very wide.
I take serious issue with the assertion that most christians are not devout. Devotion manifests in different ways.
Let us call it Hasanism, then.
The complicating factor here is that one of the tenets of Hasanism is that the Hasanist believes that it is Islam. Should we be surprised, then, that some people believe him? Especially — but not solely — people with a predisposition to distrust Islam.
How is someone who wants to take measures to prevent future attacks to distinguish between Hasanists and Muslims? Without actual horrific acts, how is an outsider to tell the the difference between Hasanism and Islam? Are statements in support of Hasanism or opposition to it evidence enough for that? Your own statements, Aziz, make you unequivoally not a Hasanist. Major Hasan’s public statements and writings should have been a big clue; but if reports are accurate, his colleagues and superiors, unable to distinguish between Hasanism and Islam, did not take necessary action because that would be perceived as hostile to Islam — not to Hasanism.
I am happy to distinguish between Hasanism and Islam. But that’s not an easy line to draw. And when it comes to security measures, I think it has to be drawn conservatively.
ok Martin, lets “draw the line conservatively”. Specifically, you agree that muslims should now be barred from the military?
and iven how many warning signs there were that Hasan was disturbed and flirting with radicalism, I think that Hasanism is very easily distinguished from Islam indeed. Not to mention the most obvious point of distinction – that only Hasan went on a shooting spree, whereas the tens of thousands of other muslims in the military havent.
Aziz,
Where did I say that Muslims should be barred from the military? Please reread and try another comment.
Apparently Major Hasan’s superiors did not find it easy to recognize Hasanism prior to the violence. I’m saying that’s not soon enough. I think you’ll agree.
Who said it was Islam? It was radical Islam.
Sheesh!
Why would we ban all Muslims because of one deranged radical?
OTOH, if a Muslim gives a presentation saying “we love death more than you love life,” attends the services of a imam preaching terrorism, and equates suicide bombers to falling on a grenade to save one’s friends, maybe the FBI should be keeping a close eye on him.
“And yet there are those who argue that Hasan was driven to do what he did because of Islam”
This is beyond dispute. What else could we possibly say drove him?
“OTOH, if a Muslim gives a presentation saying “we love death more than you love life”
actually the presentation is on the web. its not what you think – see
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2009/11/10/GA2009111000920.html
The problem for us outside the bounds of Islam is that we don’t understand the intramural stuff. Muslims kill each other and they don’t seem to be bothering to give us a program so we can tell what are the sides, what’s at stake, and who should we be cheering for.
We’d be more than happy to take any of the bad muslims (I hope we can all agree that there are bad muslims) we get our hands on and take them out of circulation but we’ve got a target identification problem. This is frustrating. This leads us to be annoyed with all muslims because we’ve got all these shiny spy satellites, UAVs, etc. etc. etc. that we’d love to use to get rid of the lunatics if we could sift the haystack in order to find the needles.
We blame muslims because they don’t bitch slap the western liberals who make it risky to speak out against a Hasan in time for it to do any good. We blame the muslims because we think they’re slow and inefficient at sorting out their little civil war and we’re tired of being collateral damage as their lunatic fringe tries to impress the faithful.
Is it right to blame Islam for Hasan? He made his own choices. But the larger Islamic situation impeded our ability to process him out of the army and for that, muslims need to consider how to help make sure there’s no repeats. I think that being upset at even the Islamic good guys is understandable. The upset ought to be properly calibrated though. We shouldn’t lose sight that these are by and large good people who need to step up more than nefarious bad guys out to do evil.
It’s exactly what I think. Look at the Conclusions page: it says violence in the name of Islam is condoned, and that God isn’t moderate.
Did you not see the interviews with people in the audience? Several moderate Muslims stood up and said “Hey, this isn’t what we believe” and a lot of people were disturbed by his comments.
It’s exactly what I think. Look at the Conclusions page: it says violence in the name of Islam is condoned, and that God isn’t moderate.
But Dave, if you read it thoroughly, it doesn’t sound like a statement of Major Hasan’s beliefs. It sounds like Major Hasan explaining different Islamic perspectives to a military audience.
And that’s why slides are pretty much useless here. They don’t tell us what he said of how he said it or how the audience interpreted it. They don’t tell us which beliefs he endorsed and which he repudiated. The audience interviews tell us somewhat more there; but even then, those are interpretations, and mostly interpretations we’re hearing after the murders. That will necessarily color the interpretations. Statements made before the murders are much more reliable. Those still are pretty extreme, if what I’ve read is accurate.
Martin,
Again, people in the audience weren’t taking it as some dispassionate analysis of what the lunatic fringe believes.
In fact, reading the last pages it clearly isn’t. He’s recommending a change in Army policy based on these ideas.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/87980/
Here’s the audience reaction:
He gave a Grand Rounds presentation. . . You take turns giving a lecture on, you know, the correct treatment of schizophrenia, the right drugs to prescribe for personality disorder, you know, that sort of thing. But instead of giving an academic paper, he gave a lecture on the Koran, and they said it didn’t seem to be just an informational lecture, but it seemed to be his own beliefs. That’s what a lot of people thought.
He talked about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire. And I said well couldn’t this just be his educating you? And the psychiatrist said yes, but one of the Muslims in the audience, another psychiatrist, raised his hand and was quite disturbed and he said you know, a lot of us don’t believe these things you’re saying, and that there was no place where Hasan couched it as this is what the Koran teaches but you know I don’t believe it. And people actually talked in the hallway afterwards about ‘is he one of these people that’s going to freak out and shoot people someday?
Dave,
I’d be more persuaded if those statements and concerns were in the written record before the murders. After the murders, memories are suspect. We have some indicators from before the murders that Major Nasan at minimum sympathized with extremists. Those I find more convincing.
But I maintain that those slides themselves would be 100% appropriate for a lecture on “Here is what some Muslims believe, and here is why it could cause morale or ethical conflicts that we will have to address, and here is how I think we should address it.” You or I could use those exact same slides to give that talk. The presentation is the key difference. I wish we had tape of the event, not just memories. I suspect somewhere tape exists, and it will come out during the investigation.
But what’s the point of all this? What if we all agree, even Aziz — yeah, Islam, or something that calls itself Islam with some meaningful level of authority, has a tendency, and a bad one, to give potential killers an internal moral, psychological and social green light to follow through on their rage and pull the trigger, in a way that no other “major religion” has?
Now what? Where does that get us?
This guy’s ravings were lunatic enough that he should have been put on ice a long time ago, and the Army completely dropped the ball. Is our point that it did so because it treats Muslims with kid gloves (even as the military most assuredly does not do regarding certain other religious minorities)? If so, then let’s focus on that point — because we aren’t about to outlaw Islam or do anything that is either constitutionally or politically impossible about it.
A similar question might be, “If America is such a violent country, how come there isn’t a mass-shooting on most days?”
To say Islam is a (the) problem is only to say that contemporary Islam is behind way more acts of civilian-targetting violence than any other religion.
When I heard about this story, my FIRST thought was, “It’s probably a Muslim.”
Many, many, many people’s first thought was the same, and they were right.
So, the idea that Islam is unusualy prone to violence has predictive ability, a strong sign of a valid theory.
If I read that some guy shot up a school, then himself, I would think, “Probably an American (white male no less),” and my chances of being correct would be pretty good.
“Now what? Where does that get us?”
The first step in dealing with any problem is an honest assessment of the problem. In fact, it is often the most important step.
The acknowledgement of a uniquely Islamic problem with religious violence should lead to increased efforts to moderate Islam — shunning violent radicals, embracing moderate imams, separation of mosque and state, as well as an increase in efforts to reconcile Islam with women’s rights and gay rights.
If the problem was Christian extremists, we would not be having this discussion; they would be openly mocked and derided. There is a cult of political correctness in the West: “Ooh look how tolerant and inclusive I am! I am above tribalism! (except of course my tribe of PC moral relativists which is actually the best tribe!11!1!)” It shuts down debate by refusing to acknowledge any reality that might involve anything resembling xenophobia.
Wow, now THERE is some great logic, Aziz!!! You gotta be kidding me, right ?
ROTFLMAO. It couldn’t be Islam, because, well nobody has done that before. Well, except for the fragging in Iraq. Nice, moron.
This guy’s ravings were lunatic enough that he should have been put on ice a long time ago, and the Army completely dropped the ball.
Perhaps that’s more speculation rather than established fact. There is another scenario out there, that doesn’t necessarily blame Islam nor the U.S. Army, primarily.
And apologists for Islam need not rush to say it wasn’t the fault of their religion. They well may have been poisoned centuries ago or even 50 years ago.
This alternative approach speculatively might be called the ‘Yasser Arafat lifetime achievement terrorist derangement syndrome’ wherein all the actions of violence, vest bombs and remote explosions are carefully planned by sane and careful individuals.
And of course, the actions of Arafat have had no bearing on the beliefs of muslims, only on the beliefs of Arafat and ermh — the Al-Aqsa Mosque Martyrs Brigades and a few other loyalists.
After all Yasser was a Nobel Peace prize winner and the father of terrorism all combined into one. To quote Arafat, the Palestinian:
“Whoever stands by a just cause cannot possibly be called a terrorist.”
In the same vein, Hitler may well have been a mad man but Adolf Eichmann was certifiably sane.
Will we know if Major Hasan shared a similar sane ideology ala his particular cultural background ?
And would not his training and psychiatric background be a perfect cover to hide his ideological reliability while pursuing his overt but less than satisfactory career path ?
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