Fort Hood Islamophobia or Military Stress?

The Nation highlights the Muslim backlash that grew out of the killings at Fort Hood army base: A U.S. soldier — Major Malik Nidal Hasan — identified as the gunman had a name that led to the presumption that he was Muslim, inspired an all-too-predictable outbreak of Islamophobia. The point here is not to defend the soldier or his alleged actions. Rather, it is to question the rush to judgment regarding not just this one Muslim but all Muslims.

Fox News host Shepard Smith asked Senator Hutchison on air: “The name tells us a lot, does it not, senator?” Hutchinson’s response? “It does. It does, Shepard.”

Paul Sullivan, executive director of the group Veterans for Common Sense, noted that the incident might well be the latest in a series of stress-related homicides and suicides involving soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan or are being dispatched to those occupied lands.

Major Malik Nidal Hasan is a psychiatrist who had served in the Department of Psychology at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Bethesda Naval Facility in Bethesda, Maryland, before his transfer to Fort Hood.

The New York Times has a profile of Hasan:

Born and reared in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small Palestinian town near Jerusalem, he joined the Army right out of high school, against his parents’ wishes. The Army, in turn, put him through college and then medical school, where he trained to be a psychiatrist.

Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan.

“He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”