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Showing posts with label Fort Hood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fort Hood. Show all posts
Friday, July 19, 2013
Friday, November 06, 2009
No Reports of Harassment of Islamic Soldiers
Muslim Veterans Group Says No Reports of Harassment of Islamic Soldiers
Friday, November 06, 2009
By Joshua Rhett Miller
Nidal Malik Hasan
A Muslim veteran affairs organization says it has not received reports of harassment from Islamic soldiers, contrary to claims by a relative of the man authorities say is responsible for the worst mass killing on a U.S. military base.
Abdul-Rashid Abdullah, deputy director of the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, told FoxNews.com that the nonprofit group has not received a single report recently of a U.S. soldier being harassed "simply because he was Muslim."
"That kind of report is inconsistent with what we've heard," Abdullah said prior to a press conference in Washington to denounce Thursday's shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 dead and 38 wounded. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old Army psychiatrist who was reportedly due to be deployed later this month, is accused in the mass shooting.
Abdullah said his organization, which condemned the "unspeakable" attack, serves "several thousand" Muslim soldiers.
SLIDESHOW: Deadly rampage at Fort Hood Army Base
Hasan was shot four times during the Thursday attack and remained unconscious early Friday. He reportedly had told relatives in Virginia that he began having second thoughts about his military career after fellow soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim.
Hasan's aunt, Noel Hasan, of Falls Church, Va., told The Washington Post her nephew wanted out of the military following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks due to harassment about being a Muslim.
"Some people can take it and some people cannot," she told the newspaper. "He had listened to all of that and he wanted out of the military."
Nawar Shora, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, expressed his sympathies to the victims and their relatives on Friday.
"We were all shocked at the tragedy yesterday at Fort Hood and the act of cowardice by the attacker," Shora said. "We were all attacked yesterday. Let's remember that this was an attack on all Americans and it’s a time for all Americans to come together in unity and in faith."
Alejandro Beutel, government liaison for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said the Muslim-American community is "appalled" by the incident.
"We unequivocally denounce this heinous act against our brave men and women serving in the military to protect our country," Beutel said. "We pray for [the victims'] well-being and for the safety of the entire nation."
Lt. Col. Les Melnyck, a Defense Department spokesman, said that as of August, 3,557 active duty troops of roughly 1.4 million identified themselves as being Muslim. According to the self-reported figures, the largest religious preference identified was Roman Catholic (284,000), followed by "no preference," he said.
"It's self-reported so you don't have to fill in that box," Melnyck said, adding that 1,710 Muslims are currently serving in the Army, by far the most of any service branch.
Friday, November 06, 2009
By Joshua Rhett Miller
Nidal Malik Hasan
A Muslim veteran affairs organization says it has not received reports of harassment from Islamic soldiers, contrary to claims by a relative of the man authorities say is responsible for the worst mass killing on a U.S. military base.
Abdul-Rashid Abdullah, deputy director of the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, told FoxNews.com that the nonprofit group has not received a single report recently of a U.S. soldier being harassed "simply because he was Muslim."
"That kind of report is inconsistent with what we've heard," Abdullah said prior to a press conference in Washington to denounce Thursday's shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 dead and 38 wounded. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old Army psychiatrist who was reportedly due to be deployed later this month, is accused in the mass shooting.
Abdullah said his organization, which condemned the "unspeakable" attack, serves "several thousand" Muslim soldiers.
SLIDESHOW: Deadly rampage at Fort Hood Army Base
Hasan was shot four times during the Thursday attack and remained unconscious early Friday. He reportedly had told relatives in Virginia that he began having second thoughts about his military career after fellow soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim.
Hasan's aunt, Noel Hasan, of Falls Church, Va., told The Washington Post her nephew wanted out of the military following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks due to harassment about being a Muslim.
"Some people can take it and some people cannot," she told the newspaper. "He had listened to all of that and he wanted out of the military."
Nawar Shora, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, expressed his sympathies to the victims and their relatives on Friday.
"We were all shocked at the tragedy yesterday at Fort Hood and the act of cowardice by the attacker," Shora said. "We were all attacked yesterday. Let's remember that this was an attack on all Americans and it’s a time for all Americans to come together in unity and in faith."
Alejandro Beutel, government liaison for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said the Muslim-American community is "appalled" by the incident.
"We unequivocally denounce this heinous act against our brave men and women serving in the military to protect our country," Beutel said. "We pray for [the victims'] well-being and for the safety of the entire nation."
Lt. Col. Les Melnyck, a Defense Department spokesman, said that as of August, 3,557 active duty troops of roughly 1.4 million identified themselves as being Muslim. According to the self-reported figures, the largest religious preference identified was Roman Catholic (284,000), followed by "no preference," he said.
"It's self-reported so you don't have to fill in that box," Melnyck said, adding that 1,710 Muslims are currently serving in the Army, by far the most of any service branch.
Fort Hood Shootings
Spencer: Jihad at Fort Hood
In FrontPage this morning, I summarize what we know so far:
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, murdered twelve people and wounded twenty-one inside Fort Hood in Texas yesterday, while, according to eyewitnesses, "shouting something in Arabic while he was shooting." Investigators are scratching their heads and expressing puzzlement about why he did it. According to NPR [1], "the motive behind the shootings was not immediately clear, officials said." The Washington Post [2] agreed: "The motive remains unclear, although some sources reported the suspect is opposed to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and upset about an imminent deployment." The Huffington Post spun faster, asserting that "there is no concrete reporting as to whether Nidal Malik Hasan was in fact a Muslim or an Arab."
Yet there was, and what's more, Major Hasan's motive was perfectly clear -- but it was one that the forces of political correctness and the Islamic advocacy groups in the United States have been working for years to obscure. So it is that now that another major jihad terror attack has taken place on American soil, authorities and the mainstream media are at a loss to explain why it happened - and the abundant evidence that it was a jihad attack is ignored.
Nidal Malik Hasan was born in Virginia but didn't think of himself as an American: on a form he filled out at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, he gave his nationality not as "American" but as "Palestinian." A mosque official found that curious, saying: "I don't know why he listed Palestinian. He was not born in Palestine."
He is a graduate of Virginia Tech and has a doctorate in psychiatry from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. While there, NPR reports, Hasan was "put on probation early in his postgraduate work" and was "disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues."
He was a staff psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for six years before transferring to Fort Hood earlier this year. While at Walter Reed, he was a "very devout" member of and daily visitor to the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring. Faizul Khan, a former imam at the Center, expressed puzzlement over Hasan's murders: "To know something like this happened, I don't know what got into his mind. There was nothing extremist in his questions. He never showed any frustration....He never showed any remorse or wish for vengeance on anybody."
So he identified himself as Palestinian and was a devout Muslim - so what? These things, of course, have no significance if one assumes that Islam is a Religion of Peace and that when a devout Muslim reads the Koran's many injunctions to wage war against unbelievers, he knows that they have no force or applicability for today's world. Unfortunately, all too many Muslims around the world demonstrate in both their words and their deeds that they take such injunctions quite seriously. And Nidal Hasan gave some indications that he may have been among them.
On May 20, 2009, a man giving his name as "NidalHasan" posted this defense of suicide bombing [3] (all spelling and grammar as it is in the original):
Maybe he just snapped, perhaps under the pressure of his imminent deployment to Iraq. But it's noteworthy that if he did, he snapped in exactly the same way that several other Muslims in the U.S. military have snapped in the past. In April 2005, a Muslim serving in the U.S. Army, Hasan Akbar, was convicted of murder for killing two American soldiers and wounding fourteen in a grenade attack in Kuwait. AP reported: "Prosecutors say Akbar told investigators he launched the attack because he was concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq. They said he coolly carried out the attack to achieve 'maximum carnage' on his comrades in the 101st Airborne Division."
And Hasan's murderous rampage resembles one that five Muslim men in New Jersey tried to carry out at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 2007, when they plotted to enter the U.S. Army base and murder as many soldiers as they could.
That was a jihad plot. One of the plotters, Serdar Tatar, told an FBI informant late in 2006: "I'm gonna do it....It doesn't matter to me, whether I get locked up, arrested, or get taken away, it doesn't matter. Or I die, doesn't matter, I'm doing it in the name of Allah." Another plotter, Mohamad Shnewer, was caught on tape saying, "They are the ones, we are going to put bullets in their heads, Allah willing."
Nidal Hasan's statements about Muslims rising up against the U.S. military aren't too far from that, albeit less graphic. The effect of ignoring or downplaying the role that Islamic beliefs and assumptions may have played in his murders only ensures that - once again - nothing will be done to prevent the eventual advent of the next Nidal Hasan.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/06/jihad-at-fort-hood-by-robert-spencer/
URLs in this post:
[1] According to NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120138496
[2] Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/05/AR2009110503467.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR
[3] a man giving his name as "NidalHasan" posted this defense of suicide bombing: http://www.scribd.com/NidalHasan
[4] Image: http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Ffrontpagemag.com%2F2009%2F11%2F06%2Fjihad-at-fort-hood-by-robert-spencer%2F&linkname=Jihad%20at%20Fort%20Hood%20%26%238211%3B%20by%20Robert%20Spencer
Posted by Robert on November 6, 2009 3:58 AM
In FrontPage this morning, I summarize what we know so far:
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, murdered twelve people and wounded twenty-one inside Fort Hood in Texas yesterday, while, according to eyewitnesses, "shouting something in Arabic while he was shooting." Investigators are scratching their heads and expressing puzzlement about why he did it. According to NPR [1], "the motive behind the shootings was not immediately clear, officials said." The Washington Post [2] agreed: "The motive remains unclear, although some sources reported the suspect is opposed to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and upset about an imminent deployment." The Huffington Post spun faster, asserting that "there is no concrete reporting as to whether Nidal Malik Hasan was in fact a Muslim or an Arab."
Yet there was, and what's more, Major Hasan's motive was perfectly clear -- but it was one that the forces of political correctness and the Islamic advocacy groups in the United States have been working for years to obscure. So it is that now that another major jihad terror attack has taken place on American soil, authorities and the mainstream media are at a loss to explain why it happened - and the abundant evidence that it was a jihad attack is ignored.
Nidal Malik Hasan was born in Virginia but didn't think of himself as an American: on a form he filled out at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, he gave his nationality not as "American" but as "Palestinian." A mosque official found that curious, saying: "I don't know why he listed Palestinian. He was not born in Palestine."
He is a graduate of Virginia Tech and has a doctorate in psychiatry from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. While there, NPR reports, Hasan was "put on probation early in his postgraduate work" and was "disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues."
He was a staff psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for six years before transferring to Fort Hood earlier this year. While at Walter Reed, he was a "very devout" member of and daily visitor to the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring. Faizul Khan, a former imam at the Center, expressed puzzlement over Hasan's murders: "To know something like this happened, I don't know what got into his mind. There was nothing extremist in his questions. He never showed any frustration....He never showed any remorse or wish for vengeance on anybody."
So he identified himself as Palestinian and was a devout Muslim - so what? These things, of course, have no significance if one assumes that Islam is a Religion of Peace and that when a devout Muslim reads the Koran's many injunctions to wage war against unbelievers, he knows that they have no force or applicability for today's world. Unfortunately, all too many Muslims around the world demonstrate in both their words and their deeds that they take such injunctions quite seriously. And Nidal Hasan gave some indications that he may have been among them.
On May 20, 2009, a man giving his name as "NidalHasan" posted this defense of suicide bombing [3] (all spelling and grammar as it is in the original):
There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that "IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE" and Allah (SWT) knows best.
Of course, it may not be the same Nidal Hasan. But there is more. One of his former colleagues, Col. Terry Lee, recalled Hasan saying statements to the effect of "Muslims have the right to rise up against the U.S. military"; "Muslims have a right to stand up against the aggressors"; and even speaking favorably about people who "strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square."
Maybe he just snapped, perhaps under the pressure of his imminent deployment to Iraq. But it's noteworthy that if he did, he snapped in exactly the same way that several other Muslims in the U.S. military have snapped in the past. In April 2005, a Muslim serving in the U.S. Army, Hasan Akbar, was convicted of murder for killing two American soldiers and wounding fourteen in a grenade attack in Kuwait. AP reported: "Prosecutors say Akbar told investigators he launched the attack because he was concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq. They said he coolly carried out the attack to achieve 'maximum carnage' on his comrades in the 101st Airborne Division."
And Hasan's murderous rampage resembles one that five Muslim men in New Jersey tried to carry out at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 2007, when they plotted to enter the U.S. Army base and murder as many soldiers as they could.
That was a jihad plot. One of the plotters, Serdar Tatar, told an FBI informant late in 2006: "I'm gonna do it....It doesn't matter to me, whether I get locked up, arrested, or get taken away, it doesn't matter. Or I die, doesn't matter, I'm doing it in the name of Allah." Another plotter, Mohamad Shnewer, was caught on tape saying, "They are the ones, we are going to put bullets in their heads, Allah willing."
Nidal Hasan's statements about Muslims rising up against the U.S. military aren't too far from that, albeit less graphic. The effect of ignoring or downplaying the role that Islamic beliefs and assumptions may have played in his murders only ensures that - once again - nothing will be done to prevent the eventual advent of the next Nidal Hasan.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/06/jihad-at-fort-hood-by-robert-spencer/
URLs in this post:
[1] According to NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120138496
[2] Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/05/AR2009110503467.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR
[3] a man giving his name as "NidalHasan" posted this defense of suicide bombing: http://www.scribd.com/NidalHasan
[4] Image: http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Ffrontpagemag.com%2F2009%2F11%2F06%2Fjihad-at-fort-hood-by-robert-spencer%2F&linkname=Jihad%20at%20Fort%20Hood%20%26%238211%3B%20by%20Robert%20Spencer
Posted by Robert on November 6, 2009 3:58 AM
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