Month: November 2009

Jason Zengerle counters Fallows:

[T]o ignore the circumstances of this particular shooting would be like saying Oswald was just some random wacko whose actions occurred in a total vacuum, that the Cold War, his Marxist sympathies, the fact that he lived in the Soviet Union for a time, were all basically irrelevant. They weren't. And while the are are many things we don't yet–and may never–know about Nidal Malik Hasan and what drove him to commit such an evil act, we can't ignore the things we do know. If only because, by ignoring them, we allow others, like Malkin and her ilk, to try to define them for us.

Chait reads a recent editorial in the Weekly Standard and concludes:

A magazine like National Review specializes in making the case for conservative ideas. The Standard's contribution is to assert over and over that Republicans are succeeding, or at least doing better than you think they are. The idea is to buck up your side and encourage them to keep fighting, in order to ward off the self-defeating psychology of losing.

It's unclear to me why the subscribers of that magazine pay money to be the subjects of a disinformation campaign. To be sure, like any stopped clock, sometimes the Standard gets it right. But there's a distinctly Pravda-esque feel to the political coverage that makes back reading an enjoyable experience. With help from Noah Kristula-Green, I pulled together some examples:

Dish fave (on Palin, of course):

Date: 10/13/2008
Headline: Palin Comes Out Swinging: And keeps hope alive for McCain.
The Good News: "Sarah Palin's scintillating success in last week's vice presidential debate with Joe Biden has made her an enormous asset (again) to John McCain's bid for the presidency. …

"McCain should feel vindicated. His choice of Palin as his running mate has turned out extraordinarily well. There's never been a national candidate like her, a mother of five from the boondocks who grins as she skewers her opponents. More important, she's given a significant gift to McCain. She's improved his chances of winning."

Killeen, Texas – where Fort Hood is located – was the victim of another mass shooting 18 years ago:

The Luby's massacre was an incident of mass murder that took place on October 16, 1991 when George Jo Hennard drove his pickup truck into a Luby's Cafeteria and shot and killed 23 people, wounded another 20 and then committed suicide by shooting himself. It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history until the Virginia Tech Massacre.

On October 16, 1991, Hennard drove his 1987 Ford Ranger pickup truck through the front window of a Luby's Cafeteria at 1705 East Central Texas Expressway in Killeen, yelled  "This is what Belton did to me!", then opened fire on the restaurant's patrons and staff with a Glock 17 pistol and later a Ruger P89. He stalked, shot, and killed 23 people and wounded another 20 before committing suicide. About 80 people were in the restaurant at the time.

The first victim was local veterinarian Dr. Michael Griffith, who ran up to the driver's side of the pickup truck to offer assistance after the truck came through the window. During the shooting, Hennard approached Suzanna Hupp and her parents. Hupp had brought a handgun  to the Luby's Cafeteria that day but had left it in her vehicle because laws in force at the time forbade the carrying of firearms. According to her later testimony her father charged at  Hennard in an attempt to subdue him but was gunned down; a short time later, Hupp's mother was also shot and killed.^[1][2][3] One patron, Tommy Vaughn, threw himself through a plate-glass window to allow others to escape.^[4] Hennard allowed a mother and her four-year-old child to leave. He reloaded several times and still had ammunition remaining when he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head after being cornered and wounded by police.^[5][6][7]

(Photo source)

Unemployment is over 10 percent; economic insecurity is profound; we have been occupying two deeply Muslim countries for eight years with no end in sight; we are grappling with massive debt and an attempt to provide some basic health insurance for the working poor. There are perfectly reasonable and important debates to have about all this – whether this is the time to expand health insurance, whether we should have done it years ago, whether a public option is a good thing, whether Medicare can be cut enough to save enough to make this affordable. But the Republican right has not engaged such a debate in a meaningful way. And yesterday, the House GOP leadership gave their blessing to a raggedy bunch of extreme anti-government fanatics whose rally contained the following elements:

The angry folks at the protest — which attracted several thousand conservatives — held up signs with messages of hate: "Get the Red Out of the White House," "Waterboard Congress," "Ken-ya Trust Obama?" One called the president a "Traitor to the U.S. Constitution." Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust. A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" — a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.

This kind of rhetoric – on the same day that the Fort Hood massacre took place – is gasoline on a fire of atavistic hate. Someone in the GOP leadership needs to call it out – before its logic propels us toward more violence and social division.

This kind of rhetoric is simply unacceptable for a major political party to institutionally embrace in a civil democracy:

Boehner, for one, declared that the health care bill is the "greatest threat to freedom that I have seen." That's some statement … And at one point during the rally — call it a Bachmannalia — when John Ratzenberger, a.k.a Cliff Clavin from "Cheers," claimed that the Democrats were turning the United States into a land of European socialism, the audience shouted, "Nazis, Nazis." No Republican legislator left the stage in protest. Boehner and his fellow GOP leaders should be asked how they feel about mounting a rally that attracted intense hate-mongering.

(Photo: People from across the country protest the health care bill at the West Front of the U.S. Capitol November 5, 2009 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

Robert Mackey is live-blogging Ft. Hood. Fallows:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don’t mean nothing.

Dreher:

No matter how badly the media try to spin it another way, or to ignore the religion ghost in this story, Hasan’s religion was to all appearances a key factor in the mass murder he committed. You don’t have a Muslim shouting “Allahu akbar!” as he executes people one by one, and conclude that religion is incidental to his crime. You have to be a moral idiot to draw that conclusion, a politically correct nitwit.

So: how should we regard the role of Hasan’s religion in this infamy?

Spencer Ackerman:

Ft. Hood’s commander, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, said today that there are unconfirmed reports that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “God is great” in Arabic before opening fire yesterday at the Army base. Again: we will soon be able to hear Hasan’s motivations in his own words. Even if he shouted such a thing, it would no more reflect on his co-religionists than does the fanatic who murdered Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller and who happened to consider himself a devout Christian does on his co-religionists. It’s worth remembering that nearly all mass shootings in this country are committed by white men. Do we have a white-man problem on our hands?

John Infidelesto:

This was jihad.

John Nichols:

Enlightened Americans — at least those who trace their patriotism to Thomas Jefferson, a man fascinated by and respectful of Islam whose library contained copies of the Koran — should be unsettled by the rush to judgment regarding not just this one Muslim but all Muslims.

Blackfive:

More will be revealed.  From where I stand, much of this looks like religion-inspired terror.  We need to know who his spiritual advisors are (one account is that his chaplain was the same guy who counseled Hasan Akbar, the Army sergeant who killed his fellow soldiers). Last, many soldiers I have spoken with are deeply concerned about the President’s response.  The President spoke for minutes about the Tribal Conference before addressing the tragedy on Fort Hood.  What was THAT about?

Reihan Salam:

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 45 percent of Americans know a Muslim. Of those who have a high level of familiarity with Islam, 57 percent view Muslims favorably while 25 percent view them unfavorably. For those with a low level of familiarity, 21 percent have a favorable view, 35 percent have an unfavorable view, and 44 percent, a significant plurality, have no opinion. The Pew survey also found that 58 percent of Americans believe that Muslims face a high level of discrimination, while 64 percent believe the same is true for gays and lesbians. These numbers suggest that a large majority of Americans are open-minded about Muslims. And though there are pockets of distrust, far more Americans worry that Muslims face discrimination than hold negative views of Muslims. The danger is that Hasan’s despicable crime will subtly and slowly change these perceptions for the worse.

Greenwald:

[S]houldn’t there be some standards governing what gets reported and what is held back?  Particularly in a case like this — which, for obvious reasons, has the potential to be quite inflammatory on a number of levels — having the major media “report” completely false assertions as fact can be quite harmful.  It’s often the case that perceptions and judgments about stories like this solidify in the first few hours after one hears about it.  The impact of subsequent corrections and clarifications pale in comparison to the impressions that are first formed.  Despite that, one false and contradictory claim after the next was disseminated last night by the establishment media with regard to the core facts of the attack.

Glenn Reynolds:

EXPLOSIVE: Ft. Hood suspect reportedly shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’.…On NPR I heard — I can’t find the story on their website yet — that he had given a presentation on the Koran at a professional conference where he claimed that unbelievers should be beheaded, burned, etc. to the discomfiture of the attendees.

John Cook:

[T]he above would seem to confirm what many on the wingnut right seemed to positively hope was the case last night—that Hasan’s rampage was an act of Islamist terrorism, as opposed to the result of a breakdown or mental illness or the garden-variety insane rage and alienation that has inspired what seems like a mass killing every other month. We all know what first came to mind when Hasan’s name was released yesterday. But we suppose a handy guide for finding the line that divides the Glenn Becks of the world from the rest of us is whether you reacted with dread at the idea that it may have been related, however murkily, to Islamism, or if you were filled with smug delight.

Jonah Goldberg:

I always thought Bush’s response [to 9/11] was fine. It was also very different than Obama’s [response to Fort Hood], at least as I understand it. Obama was briefed on the shooting before he went out. He opted to do the schmoozy stuff. Bush was presented with staggering news and kept his cool. Not that these readers disagree, but this example works in Bush’s favor and against Obama. And it makes a lot of Bush’s critics look even worse for politicizing that moment on 9/11.

Adam Serwer:

Michelle Malkin, whose book In Defense of Internment advocated for the use of racial profiling against Arabs and Muslims, quickly recycled a 2003 column suggesting that there was something wrong with allowing Muslims to serve in the armed forces. “Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror,” Malkin tweeted. Don’t you see? If we had just listened to her, and treated those people as enemies to begin with, this would never have happened. There are thousands of Arab-Americans serving in the armed forces, and many have given their lives defending this country–Malkin would have us see all of them as potential traitors.

Frum passes along some pictures to keep in mind today.

My friend Bruce Bawer has a powerful piece up on Fort Hood. Money quote:

CNN (ditto the New York Times website) was considerably less useful than the tidbits I picked up online by following links on various blogs and in Facebook postings. They led me to (among other things) an AP story, a Daily Mail article, and a Fox News interview that provided telling details: Hasan had apparently been a devout Muslim; Arabic words, reportedly a Muslim prayer, had been posted on his apartment door in Maryland; in conversations with colleagues he had repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers; on Thursday morning, hours before the massacre, he had supposedly handed out copies of the Koran to neighbors. A couple of these facts eventually surfaced on CNN, but only briefly; they were rushed past, left untouched, unexamined; the network seemed to be making a masterly effort to avoid giving this data a cold, hard look. Meanwhile it spent time doing heavy-handed spin — devoting several minutes, for example, to an inane interview with a forensic psychiatrist who talked about the stress of treating soldiers bearing the emotional scars of war. The obvious purpose was to turn our eyes away from Islamism and toward psychiatric instability as a motive.

I have no doubt that avoiding this ugly possibility did guide CNN. But equally, it should be said, many of these reports were hard to confirm yesterday, their implications explosive and there was a legitimate need to keep an open mind on a news day when the most basic facts – such as whether the killer was dead or alive – were wrong. AC360 ran the video below, for example, of Hasan in Muslim attire. That doesn't seem so p.c. to me.

But what does Bruce want the US to do in response to an incident like this?

Screen all potential Muslim soldiers in future? Have special surveillance of such soldiers? It's easy to see how this might make matters worse just as it might make them better. Michelle Malkin, remember, favored interning Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Is that what the anti-Jihadists now want for American Muslims? Or what, exactly?

Denial of these Islamist currents, even within the military, is dangerous and foolish. But equally, over-reacting to them is dangerous and foolish. The cycle of sectarian distrust and division can happen here as well as over there. Reducing all of us to these atavistic identities only exacerbates the problem and drags us further into the cycle of medieval religious conflict. And the task of threading our way through this political minefield is immense.

If I thought we couldn't do it, I'd despair. But I believe we can, and have since this war broke out on September 11. We need to remember that we are not fighting for Christianity over Islam or even the West over Islam. We are fighting to retain an open democracy, where all religions can coexist, where religion is separate from politics, where toleration is a civic virtue. This requires attention to the real and dangerous Islamist threat – and in that respect Bruce's and Michelle's warnings against p.c. denial are perfectly valid and important. But it also requires insisting that our membership in society is based on a citizenship devoted to core ideas, not a citizenship based on raw religious or ethnic identity.

I fear in an economic depression, as unemployment rises over 10 percent, we live in a tinder-box in which such passions can be ignited to divide and destroy us. The key is the self-restraint to live without denial of the threat within but without the easy recourse to baser identities that will finally devour us all.

(Photo: Monica Cain, wife of soldier Darren Cain, waits outside Fort Hood on November 5, 2009 in Killeen, Texas. At least one gunman killed 12 people and injured 31 in a shooting on a military base at Fort Hood this afternoon. One shooter was killed by military police and at least two other soldiers are in custody. By Ben Sklar/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

That video reminded me of a story my mother has told me many times over the years.  My father was sent to Vietnam a month after I was born.  He returned a year later.  As you can imagine, he was very excited to see the baby whose first year of life he completely missed (no Skype or e-mail during that war).  When he went to my crib to pick me up, I had no idea who he was, so instead of the hugs and kisses that this father received, he received something else entirely.  I cried, hit him with my baby fists, and did all I could to get away from him. I cannot imagine what that must have felt like for him.

My mother also tells me that the stress of their separation took its toll on her in myriad ways—mostly notably, she stopped being able to produce milk so couldn’t breastfeed me. War is terrible on so many, many levels, and when I see that little girl’s tears, I wonder how many she shed while her dad was away and how stressful his absence must be for her other parent.

Another writes:

You bastard. I hadn't seen the video yet. I clicked through on the strength of this post and I had to scoop up my 10-month-old daughter and hold her and weep loudly. Thank God I'm at home.

It looks increasingly as if he snapped at the thought of participating in a war he might have seen as anti-Islam. This, if borne out, is grim news:

"He was making outlandish comments condemning our foreign policy and claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans," Col Lee told Fox News. "He said Muslims should stand up and fight the aggressor and that we should not be in the war in the first place." He said that Maj Hasan said he was "happy" when a US soldier was killed in an attack on a military recruitment centre in Arkansas in June.

An American convert to Islam was accused of the shootings. Col Lee alleged that other officers had told him that Maj Hasan had said "maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Time Square" in New York. He claimed he was aware that the major had been subject to "name calling" during heated arguments with other officers.

It's therefore hard to see any silver lining here. It's a tragic massacre in the first place. It will doubtless increase suspicion of Muslim servicemembers, which in turn propels more religious polarization, which makes winning this war harder still. You can instantly see how the Malkins will spin this, and how a war on American Muslims can get jump-started in America.

The danger of this war on terror, it turns out, is that it not only collapses when it hits the ground in Muslim countries – as the sheer impossibility of using force to control Islamism in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals itself – but that its religious nature can divide the West as well, rendering a minority suspect and further undermining the chances of a multi-faith democracy successfully fighting a religious war without succumbing to more primal identities. Every which way, Osama wins.

The news is pretty depressing right now; but few events have been as demoralizing as this one.

A reminder from a reader of the need to avoid generalization:

I actually laughed at that email from the South Shore only because of this perception that all tolerance for gay people only exists north of the Mason-Dixon line. Absolutely not true.

My partner and I live in Johnston County, NC.  Go look it up.  At one time not so long ago they proudly advertised they had the largest population of KKK members in the state of North Carolina.  When we built our house out here, our friends in

Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill thought we were insane. 

But you know what?  Every year, each kid in the neighborhood comes to our door for Halloween candy or hits us up for money for their sports team.  We buy their crap and talk sports with them.  Two girls in the neighborhood walk our dogs everyday.  We get invited to the neighborhood parties and everyone wants our secret to having the best yard.  And this is no liberal mecca, half of these people would qualify as "Christianists." 

But they see us acting just like them and we are no threat to their kids.  If anything we make sure every time a kid even come near our home, their parents know about it.  And those parents notice and appreciate that.  Yet, we live our lives and they live theirs.

I'll keep saying this until I am blue in the face to Gay, Inc. in this country.  Get the hell out of the gay ghettos and come live near the people who don't know anyone who is gay and you'll change hearts and minds.

At some point, Andy Tobias may have to have a few scales surgically removed from his eyes.