[Reader-list] 'Going Muslim' - America after Fort Hood.

yasir ~يا سر yasir.media at gmail.com
Fri Nov 13 12:46:14 IST 2009


what a stinking piece of hate this article is.
an exercise in how to make full use of the worst stereotypes.

this is just postal. rest is bs. pc or no pc.

the FBI building in Oklahoma wasnt bombed by postal workers
I'll take it as a sorting mistake.

best




> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > 'Going Muslim'
> >
> > Tunku Varadarajan, 11.09.09
> >
> > America after Fort Hood.
> >
> > "Going postal" is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon
> of violent rage in which a worker--archetypically a postal worker--"snaps"
> and guns down his colleagues.
> >
> > As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we
> must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we
> might dub--disconcertingly--"Going Muslim." This phrase would describe the
> turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American--a friendly
> donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort
> Hood--discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to
> vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow
> Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.
> >
> > The difference between "going postal," in the conventional sense, and
> "going Muslim," in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not
> necessarily be a psychological "snapping" point in the case of the
> imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding
> of camouflage--the camouflage of integration--in an act of revelatory
> catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a
> history of "harassment" as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not "snap"
> in the "postal" manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his
> day of murder. He even gave away--to a neighbor--a packet of frozen broccoli
> that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the
> laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious
> "departure."
> >
> > We are a civilized society. One of our cardinal rules of coexistence is
> that we (try always to) judge people only by their actions and not by their
> identity, whether racial, religious or sexual. This is our great strength as
> a society, and also, in the present circumstances, our great weakness: How
> to address the threat posed by the fact that, of the hundreds of thousands
> of Muslims in our midst, there are a few (perhaps many more than a few) who
> are so radicalized that they would kill their fellow Americans? Must we
> continue to be neutral in handling all people from different groups even
> though we know that there are differential risks posed by people of one
> group? The problem here is a heightened version of the airport security
> problem, where we check all people--including Chinese
> grandmothers--regardless of risk profiles. But can we afford that on a
> grand, national scale? (And I mean that question not merely in a financial
> sense, but also in terms
>  of
> >  the price we'd pay in failing to detect a threat in time.)
> >
> > This being America, we will insist on going a long way to preserve the
> appearance of equality, and that is no bad thing in terms of moral
> principle. But like all values, the appearance of equality is not infinite
> in its appeal--especially if it flies in the face of common sense and
> self-preservation. A short time after the shootings at Fort Hood, President
> Obama asked us not to jump to conclusions. To many Americans, this was a
> grating request, of a piece with the political correctness that was
> responsible--it has emerged--for the hands-off treatment by the Army of Maj.
> Hasan. How else could he have been left in the position of treating U.S.
> troops, given the stories we've now heard about his incendiary statements
> and apparent incompetence?
> >
> > This is the same mindset that led the FBI to deny the possibility that
> the Fort Hood massacre was linked to terrorism even before they could have
> had any idea that was the case. We don't have to be paranoid about Arab
> males; we just have to avoid the opposite: Being fearful of coming across as
> Islamophobic, and thereby failing to look straight at a situation.
> >
> > This is part of a larger--and too-hot-to-touch--American problem, which
> is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of
> normal discourse. Muslims may be more extreme because their religion is
> founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for
> piety that is more extensive than in other schemes. President Obama was as
> craven as a community college diversity vice-president when he said that no
> one should jump to conclusions. Everyone did, and he lost credibility with
> people who cannot stand civic piety in the face of the murderous kind.
> >
> > Muslims are the most difficult "incomers" in the ongoing integration
> challenge, which America has always handled with pride--and a kind of
> swagger. We're the salad bowl/melting pot. Drive through Queens to see how
> we do this.
> >
> > America differentiates itself on integration from Western European
> countries, which are far more cringing and guilt-driven in their approach.
> But can the American swagger persist if many Americans come genuinely to
> view Muslims as Fifth Columnists? The integration compact depends on a broad
> trust that the immigrant's desire to be American can happily co-exist with
> his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. Once that trust
> doesn't exist, America faces a problem in need of urgent resolution.
> >
> > Have we reached that point of breakdown in trust? Not yet, I think, and
> not by some distance; but a few more murderous incidents of the Maj. Hasan
> variety--a few more shouts of "Allahu Akbar" as Americans are shot
> dead--will push many Americans on to a dangerous cusp.
> >
> > I will end on a practical note. The PC--political correctness--problem is
> an obvious and thorny issue that the U.S. Army, at least, has to tackle. The
> Army had a self-identified Islamic fundamentalist in its midst, blogging
> about suicide bombings and telling everyone he hated the Army's mission; and
> yet, they did, or could do, nothing about it. In effect, the
> "don't-jump-to-conclusions" mentality was underway long before this man
> killed his colleagues.
> >
> > So, first, it should be part of the mandatory duty of every member of the
> armed forces to report any remarks or behavior of fellow service members
> that could be construed as indicating unfitness for duty for any reason.
> >
> > Second, there should be a duty to report such data up the chain of
> command, regardless of the assessment of the local commander.
> >
> > Third, there should be a single high-level Pentagon or army department
> that follows all such cases in real time, whether the potential ground for
> alarm is sympathy with white supremacism, radical Islamism, endorsement of
> suicide bombing or simple mental unfitness.
> >
> > Let the first lesson of the Hasan atrocity be this: The U.S. Army has to
> be a PC-free zone. Our democracy and our way of life depend on it.
> >
> > (Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at NYU's Stern Business School and a
> fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, is executive editor for opinions at
> Forbes. He writes a weekly column for Forbes. (Follow him on Twitter, here.)
> >
> >
> http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/08/fort-hood-nidal-malik-hasan-muslims-opinions-columnists-tunku-varadarajan.html
> >
> >
> >
> >
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