"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.
