By Rafia Zakaria
Wednesday, 25 Nov, 2009
US soldiers take part in an Action Control Class at the Army Center for Enhanced Performance part of the Resiliency Campus on Fort Hood Army post used to help soldiers with their mental and spiritual health in Fort Hood, Texas November 9, 2009. – Photo by Reuters.
‘Sometimes an extremist is really an extremist’ was the title of a recent column written by Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg this past week. The subject, unsurprisingly, was the ongoing investigation into the motives of Maj Hassan Nidal who shot and killed 13 people in Fort Hood, Texas.
In his piece, Mr Goldberg exhorts Americans to ‘admit it … Major Hassan is a Muslim fanatic, motivated by other Muslim fanatics’.
The debate over whether Major Nidal was plain crazy or a motivated scheming fanatic has escalated in the past few weeks with new discoveries of his contacts with Yemeni cleric Anwar Al Awlaki and the discovery of business cards in his apartment that described him as a ‘soldier of Allah’.
Conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer of the New York Times, have criticised the ‘liberal left media’ in the United States for ‘medicalising’ the incident and refusing to look at the writing on the wall. Those alleging that Maj Nidal’s actions were an act of insanity have thus been accused of wearing rose-coloured goggles that refuse to take seriously the threat of ‘homegrown terror’ in the United States.
http://newageislam.com/major-hassan-nidal--identity-or-insanity?/muslims-and-islamophobia/d/2142
