David Seaton's News Links
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
