Muslims brace for backlash after gunman ID'ed
WASHINGTON — His name had barely been released, his heritage and history not immediately known, but the reaction was fast and furious.“Jihad at Fort Hood? Shooter: Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan,” was the headline of a post on the Jihad Watch blog just moments after Hasan was identified as the perpetrator of a mass shooting at the Texas military base that killed 12 people, himself included, and wounded 31 others.
“The name tells us a lot, does it not, senator?” Fox News’s Shep Smith said while interviewing Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas senator.
The Arab-American Institute said it received one threatening call from an unidentified male shortly after Hasan’s name was released. The group, which condemned the massacre, said it was expecting more.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations scheduled a Capitol Hill news conference on Thursday night to urge calm.
“No political or religious ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence,” the group said in a statement.
“The attack was particularly heinous in that it targeted the all-volunteer army that protects our nation. American Muslims stand with our fellow citizens in offering both prayers for the victims and sincere condolences to the families of those killed or injured.”
ABC News reported that Hasan, a psychiatrist who once practised in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., was reportedly an Islam convert despondent about being deployed to Iraq and upset about the war.
Military officials told the Associated Press that Hasan was a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for six years before being transferred to Fort Hood in July. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because military records are confidential, said he received a poor performance evaluation at Walter Reed.
Hasan, born in Virginia and in his late 30s, was single with no children. The Austin American-Statesman reported his parents were originally from Jordan.
Robert Spencer, the director of the Jihad Watch blog and the author of nine books on Islam and jihad, chastised the media for failing to point to jihad as a possible explanation for Hasan’s crime.
“No one, no one at all, in the mainstream media is discussing jihad as a motivation,” Spencer wrote. “It’s all about ‘snapping,’ ’not wanting to go to war’ .... If this turns out to be a jihad attack, watch for the president to caution against ‘backlash’ and ’Islamophobia.”’
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, commenters warned of exactly that kind of backlash.
“How long before some idiotic elected official declares Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military?” asked Salon’s Mike Madden.
The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer beseeched: “Please, America, remember what kind of country you are right now.”
Josh Marshall, who writes for the TalkingPointsMemo blog, predicted: “This is going to get very dark” upon the identification of the perpetrator’s name.
“The fact that the primary assailant has an Arabic name and is presumably, though we don’t know this yet, of Muslim extraction, if not a practising Muslim, is going to be the focus of attention,” Marshall wrote.
The commenters on Jihad Watch were unforgiving in the hours after the shooting.
“The war on terror is over, and the war on Islam has begun,” one wrote. Radicals on
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