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So much of this story defies simple common sense that it is difficult to get to grips with it.
I don’t know who was crazier, the shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, or the people that assigned someone with his profile the task of treating traumatized soldiers returning from fighting Muslims.
It seems to me pure sadism on the US Army's part.
In the course of his work Nidal Malik Hasan was hearing the stories of soldiers returning from harrowing combat duty in Muslim countries, where the enemy was of the same religion as he is, and in the case of Iraq, of the same ethnic group as his.
Imagine the dynamic:
Dr/Maj Hasan is a first generation Palestinian-American and a pray-five-times-a-day-type, devout Muslim, surrounded in the US Army by a disproportionate number of born-again-Christian-racist-red-neck-scotch-irish-southerners many of whom consider his religion a form of satanism and his ethnic group, little more than animals.
I would imagine that quite often in treating these soldiers that many of them, as part of their “therapy”, would express extremely racist and hostile attitudes toward Islam and toward Muslims and narrate in great and explicit detail the atrocities they may have committed or the fantasies they might entertain of committing against Muslim men and women. Doing this would probably be a healing "catharsis" for the soldiers, but it might just have produced a malignant catharsis in Dr/Maj Hasan.
It may have been that Dr. Hasan became radicalized by this daily bombardment and had begun to identify with the Muslim suicide bombers that his patients pursued.
All said, what Hasan did was very American, he didn’t strap on an explosive belt and go for the 72 virgins, he got a gun and went on a shooting spree…. American as apple pie.
We take our comfort where we can these days. DS
I don’t know who was crazier, the shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, or the people that assigned someone with his profile the task of treating traumatized soldiers returning from fighting Muslims.
It seems to me pure sadism on the US Army's part.
In the course of his work Nidal Malik Hasan was hearing the stories of soldiers returning from harrowing combat duty in Muslim countries, where the enemy was of the same religion as he is, and in the case of Iraq, of the same ethnic group as his.
Imagine the dynamic:
Dr/Maj Hasan is a first generation Palestinian-American and a pray-five-times-a-day-type, devout Muslim, surrounded in the US Army by a disproportionate number of born-again-Christian-racist-red-neck-scotch-irish-southerners many of whom consider his religion a form of satanism and his ethnic group, little more than animals.
I would imagine that quite often in treating these soldiers that many of them, as part of their “therapy”, would express extremely racist and hostile attitudes toward Islam and toward Muslims and narrate in great and explicit detail the atrocities they may have committed or the fantasies they might entertain of committing against Muslim men and women. Doing this would probably be a healing "catharsis" for the soldiers, but it might just have produced a malignant catharsis in Dr/Maj Hasan.
It may have been that Dr. Hasan became radicalized by this daily bombardment and had begun to identify with the Muslim suicide bombers that his patients pursued.
All said, what Hasan did was very American, he didn’t strap on an explosive belt and go for the 72 virgins, he got a gun and went on a shooting spree…. American as apple pie.
We take our comfort where we can these days. DS
1 comment:
My heart and prayers go out to all the victims, their families and friends.
From all the news reports it appears this Major is a career military man and that in his current position for less than a year and was not going well. He did not want to be deployed and in fact wanted out of the Army, so he paid back his military student loans and hired an attorney.
The reason may have been that he was being harassed and called names like “camel jockey ”. I guess all that sensitivity training for those with bigotry tendencies are all for not. (Can training real change the way you were brought up?)
Another reason is called PTSD by proxy, the stress of treating PTSD in other soldiers make you go a little crazy yourself. Its even more stressful because most of the higher ranks don’t even believe in such thing as PTSD. Their denial prompts them to tell suffering soldiers to “drink it off.” Some civilians in the defense dept feel the same way no doubt IMO, it’s why hardly anything is mentioned of PTSD until one of these violent episodes occurs. These people see PTSD as a cop-out or an excuse. First we need to have an understanding that PTSD actually is real before we can ever hope to help treat it (does anyone believe that being shot at or killing your fellow man is not going to affect you in some way either then or in the future?). I guess with the high soldier suicide rate before and after deployment kinda takes care of the complaints from coming in (so those who said he should have just killed himself, well that’s already happening ). What real ticked me off when I heard that the military was trying to say that some soldiers coming back from this war with PTSD or other psychological disorders had “Pre-Existing Conditions” and that the military would not pay to treat them, I think it has been corrected but what a bunch of asses they break you and don’t want to pay.
The final issue is why does the military want to keep people in their ranks that no longer want to be there is it just sheer number? I mean is it ten percent, twenty percent. Is it that it is the only contract in the US that you can’t get out of unless to kill yourself or kill your fellow soldiers? It does not make any sense to me.
I guess the Major could just be another wacko like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nicholas, of course McVeigh was executed and apparently because Nicholas became a Christian he received a life sentenced. I real think if he gets that far the Major will get the former and not in a million years the latter.
This is so messed up, hopefully they will make some changes that make sense.
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