Colby Cosh: Taking Islam seriously
By Colby Cosh (National Post)
Non-Muslims shoot up schools, malls and post offices all the time, and it should not be surprising that when a Muslim goes looking for an external locus of blame or rage, his pathology takes a specifically Muslim form.
It is hard to put one’s finger on what was so irksome about U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Casey’s appearance on ABC’s Sunday political talk show, This Week with George Stephanopoulos. General Casey was present to make reassuring noises in the aftermath of a mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, the largest military installation on U.S. soil. The general discouraged premature speculation that would presuppose a particular outcome of the investigation into the motives of the killer, Major Nidal Hasan, and expressed support for the thousands of American Muslims in uniform. It is hard to object to either of these things — hard, indeed, to find anything specific to object to at all in his comments.
Yet I was left feeling a certain distaste with Gen. Casey’s appearance, and it took me considerable reflection to realize what bothered me: It was largely a matter of what he didn’t say. For example, Stephanopoulos presented Casey with some of the already-abundant evidence that soldiers who worked with Hasan had recognized him as an unstable anti-American religious fanatic, and had been discouraged from saying anything by fears of being accused of racism. Casey deflected the question in the manner of a corporate chief, suggesting that it is too soon to speculate on whether Hasan was a politically motivated terrorist or someone who, to use Stephanopoulos’s phrase, “just snapped.”
Both men, it seems, were totally comfortable in the binary political frame that has already been established for this calamity. We have seen the polite U.S. mainstream media, eager not to utter the “M-word” at first when all they had to go on was an Arab name, speculating that the shooter’s work as an Army psychiatrist may have undermined his mental health. This required broadcast reporters and other journalistic first-responders to improvise a diagnosis hitherto unknown to medicine — infectious post-traumatic stress disorder.
And, in fact, Gen. Casey sort of endorsed this species of dimwit liberal excess. When Stephanopoulos asked him if he thought Hasan’s shooting rampage was premeditated terrorism, he emphasized it was impossible to know and issued a slightly disconcerting vote of non-confidence in American personnel by warning against a “backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.” But when Stephanopoulos brought up the problem of PTSD in the military, Casey became quite garrulous, talking about all the great things the U.S. Army is doing to improve psychiatric “resilience” in the ranks.
It was the contrast, not necessarily the content, that was troubling. When it came to the implied possibility that political correctness had impeded the Army’s ability to protect its personnel, Casey said “we need to be very careful.” But when it came to the implied possibility that Hasan had suffered some bizarre form of PSTD by proxy, he blurted out that “we in the Army will take a very hard look at ourselves and ask ourselves the hard questions.” So where’s the commitment to “ask the hard questions” about whether hysterical institutional anti-racism might have gotten 13 people killed?
This pervasive, reflexive political imbalance now has the political right cackling “I told you so,” almost cheering audibly, as evidence of the specifically Islamic nature of Hasan’s mania emerges. But suicidal terrorists are always troubled misfits; the expectation that Nidal Hasan’s story will fall neatly into one of two bins marked “terrorist” or “nutcase” is, frankly, pretty stupid. Guess what: It will almost certainly turn out that Hasan was a quirky loner, that he had social and cognitive problems in school, that he had early and unfixable troubles with girls and women.
Non-Muslims shoot up schools, malls and post offices all the time, and it should not be surprising that when a Muslim goes looking for an external locus of blame or rage, his pathology takes a specifically Muslim form. Every week it seems like there’s some creepy family annihilator in the news who wanted to “protect” his or her children, or send them to a “better place,” by drowning them in the bath or slitting their throats. No Christian ever seems to notice that such actions are predicated on a specifically Christian notion of the afterlife, let alone express concern or shame. In an overwhelmingly Christian society, no one ever asks them to. (Maybe someone should?)
The other problem with the triumphalist-right point of view is that it is much stronger on questions than concrete solutions. No one will come right out and say that Muslims should be drummed out of the U.S. military, or that open season should be declared on them. But these seem like clear implications of accepting the Muslim view, from the other side of the mirror, that the world is in an inherent perpetual state of war between the House of Islam and the infidel West. It is ever tempting for non-Muslims to say, “If they think there’s a war on, let’s give them one and get on with it.”
The error here is, ironically, the same one that the bleeding hearts make: treating Islam as a single personal characteristic, akin to a racial origin, rather than a loosely bundled set of propositions, some of which are true and some false (nay, ludicrous). Islam needs to be taken more seriously than that, whether we are concerned with defending against it or tolerating it.
Some of this vital middle ground was located effectively by Hasan’s classmate at the Uniformed Services University, former Air Force officer Dr. Val Finnell. Lt.-Col. Finnell says that he and other students worried about Hasan, not because Islam is incompatible with being a good American, but because “he would frequently say that he was Muslim first and an American second. We questioned how somebody could be an officer in the military and swear allegiance to the constitution to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and have that type of conflict.”
That was the question that should have gotten the attention of military authorities. And note that it would have been no different if the word “Muslim” had been “Roman Catholic” or “Scientologist” or “vegan.”
