"It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy," Obama said at Fort Hood, but that sure hasn’t stopped anyone from trying.
Tonight on Hardball, for instance, Chris Matthews chalked Major Nidal Hassan’s actions up to radical Islam. He pointed to Hassan’s connections to extremists and said that so long as we were conducting wars in Islamic countries, these sorts of domestic attacks would continue.
Blaming radical Islam is imprecise and not very helpful either. So long as everyone’s speculating, why overlook the Palestinian angle? Hassan is of Palestinian descent, and his parents were from a village near Jerusalem. He isn’t talking, according to news reports, but I’m betting that when we know his mind better, he will prove to have been unhinged not just by American policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, but by American policy in Israel/Palestine– and maybe even by the events of last week, Obama’s wretched failure to follow through on his promise in Cairo to bring justice to Palestinians.
Don’t forget that Israel/Palestine played a large role for other madmen who have hurt our country: Osama bin Laden and his 9/11 bombers. And Sirhan Sirhan, too– RFK’s killer.
No wonder National Security Adviser General Jones said at J Street that he has urged Obama, if there is one problem he could fix in the world, let it be the Israel/Palestine conflict. It ripples all over the globe, he said.
Even, I imagine, to Fort Hood. When Obama was there today, he eulogized Hassan’s victims. One story stuck with me:
Staff Sergeant Amy Krueger was an athlete in high school, joined the Army shortly after 9/11… When her mother told her she couldn’t take on Osama bin Laden by herself, Amy replied: -Watch me.-
Maybe the way to honor Amy Krueger’s thwarted ambition is to actually do something to defeat Osama bin Laden. Stop blaming a religion and look at the raw grievances that animate so many people in the Muslim world.
Obscenely OT, but I wont even semi-apologize for this.
You must must read MJ Rosenberg’s rant on HuffPo about keeping religion out of Congress and government decisions. link to z.pe
[...] As for the person of faith’s objection to his tax dollars going to pay for other people’s abortion because he or she considers abortion be be murder, so what.
That is how I felt about Bush’s attack on Iraq and Israel’s use of US supplied weapons in Gaza. But my tax dollars paid for the killing anyway — just as as the opponent of capital punishment subsidizes that form of, what she considers to be, murder. [...]
And, yes, I’d apply that to Israel too. If a legislator’s support for US aid for Israel is motivated by faith, then that is just as inappropriate as opposing abortion out of religious convictions. [...]
I’ve got news for the ultra-faithful. Leviticus is about as relevant to the Constitution as “Gone With the Wind.”
Name thirteen innocent people who were killed by invasion in either Iraq, Afghanistan, or by American arms in the OT or Gaza. Not an excuse, but an exercise.
For some reason Americans are convinced that they can slaughter vast numbers of people without any sort of consequence, only when there’s some sort of immediate cost (excepting national debt, which is always someone elses problem) do they turn ‘against’ such endeavours.
They were constantly bombing Iraq for over ten years and nobody in the ‘mainstream’ said a word because nobody of any relevance died, same in Vietnam, they were bombing that place for years before the actual ‘war’ began, the protests only started once the wrong people started dying.
It’s a rather curious business, they remove pretty much all legal and judicial recompense their victims might have, then act shocked when somebody has the audacity to attack them.
The absence of the chickenhawks and 52nd chairbourne puffing out their chests whilst casually informing anyone within earshot that this is ‘war’ and ‘these things happen’ as they do when irrelevant people are murdered, is telling.
If memory serves me well, and I think it does, Iraqi civilian casualties did not enter the mainstream national discourse until after the Virginia Tech massacre.
I think many Americans, struck with the grief and sadness of that incident, despite not having immediate loved ones involved, were reminded how tragic the loss of human life can be.
Nolan? I wasn’t aware that Iraqi civilian casualties had entered the mainstream national discourse at all.
They did for a brief period of a few months or a year at most. I think both civilian casualties and American casualties in Iraq were later set aside in favor of the 2008 elections and the growing discontent at home over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There was a brief period after the first lancet report where it was discussed but it was only ever in a dailykos/huffpo sense – something to hit ‘bu$hhhhhhh’ or ‘TEH REPUKES’ over the head with, it’s a complete non issue in democratic circles (apart from Kucinich).
There was a brief period after the first lancet report where it was discussed but it was only ever in a dailykos/huffpo sense – something to hit ‘bu$hhhhhhh’ or ‘TEH REPUKES’ over the head with, it’s a complete non issue in democratic circles (apart from Kucinich).
I can agree with that characterization. It seems fitting.
“Maybe the way to honor Amy Krueger’s thwarted ambition” is to have a real 911 Commission. When John Farmer, legal counsel for the 911 Commission writes a book, published in late Sept. 2009, that says what the 9/11 Commission, public, and media was told by military and government officials, ‘was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue’, Lucy gotta lotta ‘splainin’ to do.
John Farmer doesn’t even realize the WTC buildings were rigged to come down, or maybe he does but doesn’t want to be pummeled by millions of dumbfounded dipshits for saying so. Regardless, a population which can watch WTC7 free fall for over 100 feet and buy into the claim that it was the result of office fires has little grasp of objective reality, and we aren’t going to get a real investigation into 9/11 until that changes. Granted, around three quarters of the population have come to terms with the fact that JFK’s wasn’t killed by a lone gunman, and we still haven’t made an honest effort to get to the bottom of that, so there is a huge apithy issue to deal with too.
I know, it’s truly astounding that millions of barbecuing Americans buy the shit that a 1100 F fire (according to NIST) obliterated 110 stories in two buildings in 8-9 seconds.
I like the irony that American bubbas will sit around a campfire using a Pyromid stove hissing at 1100 F ( link to z.pe
), and its thin stainless steel construction, ranting on and on about those conspiracy theorists who dont believe the official story. It gets even funnier when you’re in a good Kong Kong restaurant where the fire under the woks reaches 1800 F.
You may as well throw in the handling of the USS Liberty incident too. And the handling of Rachel Corrie.
Andrew Sullivan, whom you can’t get enough of, had some interesting things to say about this Muslim piece of shit and liberals like you, Phil, who tell lies about him. Why don’t you quote that article?
Sometime I feel sorry for Andrew OJ, it has got to be a hard line to tow – stuck in a conservative cage with other dogs and barking about their shit. Andrew gets these flashes of truth and has a good communication apparatus, but he can only attack parts and forgets the entire system that holds them together (like missing the forst for the tress).
The first flash I ever saw him come up with was him lashing out against torture (and this might just be because I had not read him much previously, there might be other pieces that he picked up). Whereas he saw torture as an atrocity, he tripped over the entire atrocity of invading Iraq – simply amazing.
So Andrew may have his faults, but he certainly has his good moments. Try eating the fish and leaving the bones. Than again OJ, you might not appreciate this assessment, but it would be no big surprise.
Hey another Islamophobe, racist Zionist Jew.
Phil loves them! He hates antisemitism though. I hope Chris Moore is watching Phil continue to selectively moderate the comment section (only people who offend his identity).
OJ heard it on Limbaugh! He did! Or was it Beck? Does it matter?
“Why don’t you quote that article? ”
What’s stopping you from doing it Ohio?
Andrew Sullivan picked the wrong fight to sing about when he clapped for our Iraqi adventure. He is in the process of stepping back. He does not yet have a sure moral footing in his writings. He has not yet expressed his disgust; he doesn’t have the power of clarity in that regard.
He claims to see things through a religious footing. But this country ardently inscribed the differentiation in its constitution. MJ Rosenberg beat him to the gate.
Two additional remarks
Attitudes of the military about the current wars vary from “teaching them ragheads a lesson about 9/11″ to “assisting the good people of Afghanistan to build a shiny new democracy” and the intuition device on my left elbow tells me the mentality at Fort Hood might lean pretty much to the former.
Fort Hood seems to be one of those places that has become completely unhinged. Dahr Jamail (link to atimes.com
mentions that they’re at a rate of 10 suicides per month.
The idea that I extract from the whole is that while Nidal Hassan has extra reasons concerning Islam and I/P to quit with a loud bang, there will be runners up without those extra reasons.
I blame the pre-mature death of Princess Diana on I/P
I’d never heard that notion before, but this does sound like a plausible explanation. Regardless, one has to be quite the coincidence theorist to buy the claim that all those CCTV cameras missed her final moments by happenstance.
Oh please. It’s people like you that made it impossible to practice sarcasm on the net.
Tweety’s an idiot. Olbermann and Maddow have kept their heads on straight about what we know about Hassan and what really matters. And scoring more cheap political points at the expense of painting the “Islamic terrorist” label — the new yellow Star of David — over the American Muslim community is only going to get us into a third idiotic war, more than anything else.
A friend of mine, who is of Asian ancestry, often describes how in the days and weeks following the Virginia Tech massacre, his son was constantly bullied and called names.
Despite the fact that the US is supposed to be a melting pot, various groups have always faced racism at one point or another, whether it was the Irish, Polish or Italian immigrants in the early part of the 20th century or the Japanese during WWII, or Muslims and Arabs since 1967, but more so after 2001.
Incidentally, Jews who were the champions of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, turned against their fellow American Muslims in the wake of the attacks of September 2001. It’s as if there was a mainstream drive to blur the distinctions between the Taliban and the Palestinians so as to position Israel as an ally in the so-called war on terror.
Jews turned against Arabs long long long before 9/11.
Just look at how Hollywood imagines Arabs and Muslims. Just look at the Jews who play them in movies.
The last time Jews treated Arabs like human beings was 100 years ago. Downhill since then.
The people who run this blog are Jewish Cliff.
Did you think you were on the KKK blog you so frequently post on?
Do the KKK have a blog?
If I want to read pure racist nonsense, I’d check out the commentary on Haaretz/YNet/etc. by ethnocentric Jews and Zionists. Pretty much anyone with a criminal sense of entitlement (it’s only ‘bad’ if it happens to the Juice – the ‘chosen’ people).
You can throw in the internment of German Americans and (to a lesser extent) of Italian Americans during WW2. There’s a bill left sitting in congress for the recognition of this American history. Needless to say few congress people are pushing it since these two groups are not recognized as a class of victims.
Cliff,
I would say that the demonization of Arabs in American discourse differed in the years prior to 1967 and after.
Before 1967, correct me if I’m wrong, it seems to me they were viewed as primitive tribal people, the whole Lawrence of Arabia caricature, whereas after 1967, they were viewed as anti-Semitic, violent terrorists. The former stemmed from racism, while the latter was based on an additional political dimension to the vilification.
Tonight on Hardball, for instance, Chris Matthews chalked Major Nidal Hassan’s actions up to radical Islam. He pointed to Hassan’s connections to extremists and said that so long as we were conducting wars in Islamic countries, these sorts of domestic attacks would continue.
Have you watched the movie Gran Torino?
Knowing that the police is likely to investigate and prosecute minorities who killed a Caucasian man than ignore the killing of a minority by another minority, Clint Eastwood’s character “sacrificed” himself to protect an Asian American boy and his family from an Asian American gang.
There were PTSD cases and countless suicides among American soldiers for years now.
On May 11, 2009 a US soldier shot and killed five fellow soldiers at Camp Liberty in Iraq.
The outrage over that incident paled in comparison to the outrage displayed over the incident at Ft. Hood.
So, it took a concept so basic and primitive – that is to say racism – to shed some light, albeit very little, on the consequences of war and PTSD. It seems in a twisted and ironic roundabout way, if there’s one thing on which Americans can agree, it’s that brown people are bad (even though Muslims can be Caucasian and blond eyed).
* blond and blue eyed.
PTSD??
Correct me if I am wrong, but did Hassan ever serve over seas? Or are you talking about Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
If Teitel was Muslim, what would y’all chalk up his barbaric act of terrorism up to?
Sometimes my first impression is that trolls are shrewd and savvy, but after a while I realize that I’m giving them too much credit. It turns out the vast majority of lack basic reading comprehension skills. Perhaps its part of the willful ignorance that often plagues them.
If you talk to enough people with PTSD, as an army psychologist does, it is bound to rub off on you to some extent or another.
Correct me if I am wrong, but did Hassan ever serve over seas? Or are you talking about Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
I think you have completely missed what PTSD is.
From what we’ve been told, he’s Palestinian too. But you guys don’t believe that Palestinians feel about their families the way you do, huh, so it’s not as if the slaughter in Gaza or the slow strangulation in the West Bank would have any impact on him?
I know sympathy’s not your strong suit by any stretch, yonira, but it might surprise you to learn, too, that people who do have sympathy are deeply affected by human suffering. Like, say, the suffering our soldiers have gone through in Iraq. Of course you’ve already established you don’t care about that either (Hey! The war was inevitable! Those guys were going to die anyway)
nice Nolan, you spout out nonsense which is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand, then when you are asked a question you don’t even attempt to answer it, you just talk shit like a God damn child.
Hasan got his MD paid for in full by the army, had a kush job @ Bethesda, once he was threatened w/ deployment he went ape shit and killed his fellow soldiers. I could care less if this was terrorism or not, this guy is a f-in coward who needs to fry. He’ll join John Allen Muhammad soon enough.
Your missing the point Yonira. No one is denying hes apeshit crazy, what we have a problem with is that his religion and ethnicity is being blamed for his craziness.
But then again you probably realized that this is in fact what everyone here is talking about. Which makes us wonder why you even bothered to post such meaningless bullshit.
White people who are deeply racists can’t help themselves, Mr. Bradley. They have to vindicate their hatred toward certain people at every turn. It proves they’re right to want to see them suffer and die for fun and profit.
Now for something completely different…
“Emanuel Warns Against Using Settlements as Distraction”
link to news.antiwar.com
Thank goodness that issue is settled (so to speak). I would say this is genuinely funny, were it not so utterly pathetic.