There is every evidence, as has been repeated here in many postings, that he was an unswerving, perfectly orthodox Muslim. He was not a recent convert, like Richard Reid or Jose Padilla, or John Walker LIndh, or David Hicks. He was not a seemingly lapsed or indifferent Muslim, as was the Taheri-Azar killer in Chapel Hill (who used his car as his murder weapon, to attempt to run down as many non-Muslim fellow students as possible). Nor was he like Maher “Mike” Hawash, who was a successful Intel engineer who then became, out of various forms of mental and emotional desarroi, more and more devoutly Muslim, which for him inexorably led to attempting to travel to Afghanistan to kill American soldiers. (His own boss was willing to “bet his life” that “Mike” Hawash was innocent of terrorist charges, right up to the day that “Mike” Hawash pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 27 years in jail.)
There have been many examples, all over the world, of Muslims killing non-Muslims because those Muslims have been inculcated with the idea that Infidels are the enemy. How could anyone think otherwise, believing that the Qur’an is the immutable and uncreated Word of God, and growing up in a state or a society or a family suffused with Islam? One might come to this conclusion even if one had just with the firm understanding that if one was a Muslim, if that was one’s identity, then one had of course to accept all that Muslims are taught to accept, and to agree that being a Muslim, and loyalty to the Umma, the Community of Believers, transcended any other conceivable loyalties. Other loyalties, in fact, for the truest Muslims simply do not exist. And even if a Muslim can have some loyalty to a Muslim nation-state, it is impossible to conceive of all but a handful of lapsed Muslims, of Muslims who are not very observant or devout Muslims, thinking that they should be loyal to a nation-state that was founded by, and its legal and political institutions developed by, Infidels, and that, consequently, constitutes an obstacle to the spread and the dominance of Islam.
Major Malik Hasan was upset, was outraged, was angry. But he was upset, was outraged, was angry, in a way prompted by Islam, shaped by Islam, directed by Islam. For the past six months, at least, he has apparently been posting on websites, praising suicide bombers, explaining their mission and justifying their acts by reference to the texts of Islam. For example, he is believed to be the “Nidal Hasan” who posted this on the Web site Scribd, comparing the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims:
If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory.
Yes, Nidal Malik Hasan was an American citizen. And Major Nidal Malik Hasan was a major in the American, Infidel army, and Major Hasan hated the world’s Infidels. For he had been taught, since childhood, and he did believe, that they, those Infidels, were at war with innocent Muslims. Infidels, he knew, were the cause of all the world’s woe. They were the ones who were fighting innocent Muslims. Never mind that the American army had bombed the Serbs to protect – in its own ignorant and confused fashion – Muslims in Bosnia, had delivered food aid to Somalia and attempted to avert civil war in that country, had been generous in aiding the ferociously-Muslim inhabitants of Aceh after the tsunami, had delivered earthquake aid to Paksitan, had spent two trillion dollars in Iraq to make it a semi-decent place and, what’s more, to hold it together, had given Pakistan thirty billion and had just announced it would give that country that is run of, by, and for Muslims, another 7.5 billion. Never mind that the U.S. was shelling out aid to Muslims all over the world and despite every conceivable provocation, treating Muslims inside and outside America with kid gloves that would, with any other enemy, been taken off long ago.
Major Malik Hasan joined the American military, but not out of patriotism, or loyalty. No, there is not a scintilla of evidence about that. He joined not because he was patriotic, but in order to have those Infidels pay for his college and his medical training. And then he found that those Infidels, having paid for all that, actually expected him to do something in return. They actually thought he owed them something. Some actually thought he might be a good and loyal soldier. But he was not one of those members of the Nation of Islam who practice quite an unorthodox brand of Islam, not one of those Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims who manage – there are a few, and those few have been able to serve in the military of the American as of other Infidel nations – to ignore what Islam inculcates. Such examples are not frequent, but certainly not impossible.
No, Major Hasan knew his Qur’an (and gave it out, apparently, to others). He knew his Sunnah – the manners and customs of the earliest Muslims, whose written embodiment consists of the Hadith and the Sira. He knew that Muslims were in a state of permanent war (though not always of open warfare) with non-Muslims, Infidels. No one could prove these beliefs inaccurate, for they were not inaccurate. They were Islam, mainstream Islam. And you can see that for yourself if you look at all the great Western scholars of Islam, who lived and wrote before the Age of Inhibition set in, and the curtain descended, and Arab money began to transform university departments so that so many of those entrusted with the teaching of anything to do with Islam was either a Muslim, or a non-Muslim apologist for Islam. There are exceptions to this, and even whole departments, particularly at European universities – see those at Leiden and Aix-en-Provence, for example.
If, as I say, you look at the work of those hundred or two hundred scholars of Islam, they had no trouble writing about what Islam does indeed teach, and what Muslims do indeed believe. And those Western scholars are reinforced, or echoed, by all of the defectors from the Army of Islam – Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mohammed Ashgar, Magdi Alam, and many others – all of them articulate, coherent, truth-telling. And there are even journalists, with long experience reporting on Muslim countries or leaders, who came to see Islam, and Muslims, in a truthful light. In France, for example, there is Jean Peroncel-Hugoz. In Italy there was the famously leftist and anti-clerical Oriana Fallaci, who though a lifelong atheist left her papers to the Vatican, because she saw the Vatican, under the current Pope, as one of the main obstacles to the spread of Islam in Europe, which she feared as she had feared, as a child, the German soldiers in Florence, and for the same reasons, and the same loyalty to mental freedom.
What do we know about Major Hasan? We know that before Fort Hood, he worked at Walter Reed Hospital, where he received “sub-par” performance ratings. He was so alarming in his behavior that the wounded soldiers, who came from Iraq and Afghanistan, were by his colleagues frequently discouraged from being with him. We know that the army then transferred him, as it tends to do with those doctors who are clearly not working out, from Walter Reed to Fort Hood. We know that he had a reputation for denouncing the American “war on Islam” – that is, he did not keep things secret. We know that he often wore a long gown and skull cap, called by some “native Arab dress” but, whatever it was, it was clearly intended by him to be Muslim dress, non-American dress. We know that he was born in this country, and raised, within a Muslim family and a Muslim milieu, in this country. We know that he was an American citizen.
But we who have bothered to find out what the texts of Islam contain, and what the tenets inculcated by those texts are, know that Major Nidal Hasan was not a Muslim in name only, not a Muslim prepared to ignore much of Islam (even if only out of calculations of temporary self-interest), but was truly devout. He thus could not possibly, though an American citizen, have been an American citizen in the sense of being loyal to America and to the principles of the American Constitution, for that Constitution is, in its letter and spirit, flatly contradicted by the Shari’a.
So it would seem to be obvious that Major Malik Hasan acted on his deepest beliefs. That they are not our beliefs. What we who are not Muslim think of the ideas of Islam that prompt what we call “suicide bombers” or “suicide killers” (and what Muslims call “shahid” or “martyrs”) is irrelevant. Yet we, or many of us, still refuse to perform the most obvious of pressing tasks – to learn what Islam contains, instead of continuing to blandly content ourselves with airy references to the “three abrahamic faiths” or to rely on such notions as “all religions are essentially the same” or even to lazily agree that Islam is accurately described merely as a “religion” when, in fact, it is a Total Belief-System unlike any “religion” or any other “religion” on earth. It is a Total Belief-System in the claims it makes on its adherents, on its clear politics and geopolitics – that is, its organization of all power, within a society or state, and its claim to rightfully dominate the entire world. It views this as a rightful claim which only the obstinacy or malevolence of Infidels refuses to accept, as they refuse to accept a faith that is suffused with violence, that teaches the uses of violence, that describes the fruits of those successful in the practice of violence, that offers a worldview in which violence in the end decides (along with the practice of what Muhammad himself defined as the essence of War -deception) who will be Victor and who will be Vanquished.
We know all this about Major Malik Hasan. This is not speculation.