HUGH FITZGERALD: MAJOR HASAN AND THE FOG OF WAR
Fitzgerald: Major Hasan and the Fog of War
#1. “Major Hasan’s motives are still being investigated, though his family and acquaintances cited stress fro his counseling job, his opposition to the wars, his pending deployment and his feeling that he was being harassed as a Muslim.”
#2. “But those who work day in and day out treating the psychological wounds of the country’s warriors say Thursday’s rampage has put a spotlight on the strains of their profession and of the patients they treat.”
#3. “Major Hasan was one of a thin line of military therapists trying to hold off a rising tide of need….nightmares, panic attacks…many military professionals, meanwhile, describe crushing schedules with 10 or more patients a day, most struggling with devastating trauma or mutilated bodies that are the product of war and the highly advanced care that kept them alive…some of those hired to heal others end up needing help themselves…”
— From the New York Sunday Times (Duranty Times), November 8, 2009, p. 23
This is what may be called part of the “fog of war.” In this case, it’s the deliberate obfuscating fog of the American press, or much of it, trying to hold off, to delay as long as it can, any fulfilling of its responsibility. This is a responsibility it has been carefully avoiding since 9.11.2001: to tell us what the texts of Islam contain, what the tenets of Islam are, what those who take Islam most seriously, and most literally, as Muslims are supposed to, believe. Such believers are willing – even in an Infidel nation-state – to choose violence rather than other means as their instrument of Jihad, and rather than participate indirectly (through financial, or moral, or other forms of non-violent support) in violent Jihad, do so directly, with no need for any participation with others in a plot. They are perfectly capable of acting alone.
The “fog of war” in this case is that emitted from the great fog-emitting factories of the American (and Western) media, determined to avoid looking sensibly at the obvious, and in coming up with the most preposterous kinds of distractions and confusions. In this they really do damage to the collective consciousness by refusing to enlighten. They only make things more difficult for those who have not only retained their sanity, but have also intelligently informed themselves, given the abdication of the responsibility by the media to properly inform us about the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam. We’re not all dopes. We are not all willing, and forever, to remain in the dark.
Now let’s just deal, as a preliminary throat-clearing or anacrusis, with those bits of text from The Times I’ve quoted just above.
Excerpt 1: “Major Hasan’s motives are still being investigated, though his family and acquaintances cited stress fro his counseling job, his opposition to the wars, his pending deployment and his feeling that he was being harassed as a Muslim.”
So his family and acquaintances come first, with their citing of “stress” from his counseling job. But what sort of “stress”? Was it the sort of “stress” that was just like the stress that any non-Muslim military psychiatrist might feel, when confronted with so much suffering from fellow, non-Muslim soldiers? Implicitly, it is, but a moment’s thought would tell us of course it wasn’t. Major Nidal Malik Hasan had no sympathy, none, for the American non-Muslims, and he was not moved to tears, not moved to anything at all, at the spectacle of the suffering, mental or physical, of those who were entrusted to his care or who, though not so entrusted, he might have seen on the wards at Walter Reed Hospital.
And his “opposition to the wars” needs elucidation. Was that “opposition” based on a Quakerish hatred of violence? Was it based on his feeling that America, the country he was born and raised in and that paid for his medical education, was losing too many men, squandering too much money, in a vain effort? Not at all. For Nidal Malik Hasan, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were wrong because American soldiers were killing Muslims (even if at the same time they were, at great danger, and great cost, doing all they could to make Iraqi and Afghan civilians more comfortable, safer, and less of a threat to one another), and that was intolerable. That Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan killed or severely wounded Americans did not bother him; whatever “stress” he felt was that of someone who, having accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in free tuition, found himself obligated to fulfill his own side of the bargain and serve in the military, when he identified completely not with the American military but with those Muslims they were fighting. So to write of his “opposition to the wars” without explaining this, importantly clarifying reality for readers, is to do a great disservice.
And what about that “pending deployment”? Again, it sounds as if he is just like all the other soldiers who might be apprehensive about a “pending deployment.” But of course that isn’t true. The non-Muslim soldiers worry about physical safety. They worry about the dangers of combat or of I.E.D.s, or of treachery, with hidden weapons, that may come from the very people they are supposed to train, to live and work beside in order to “obtain their trust” — when, of course, the real problem is that the way apparently to “gain their (Muslim) trust” is to put American lives, their own life, in danger. This is because the bigshots in Washington can’t dare to recognize that Muslim soldiers should not, cannot, be trusted. It makes no sense to believe they can.
Nidal Hasan was worried about “deployment” because he did not want to be in a situation where he might have to help Americans in an active war situation, rather than help those trying to kill those Americans. The tension was palpable. And that is what both explains, and distinguishes, his possible anxiety over a possible “deployment.” As for repeating Nidal Hasan’s claim of harassment, apparently the writers for The Times do not think it worth explaining that that claim was investigated and found to be completely baseless. It’s enough that Nidal Hasan – who was in fact treated with kid gloves throughout his career in the army – once made the charge. Just the way so many Muslims so aggressively and systematically do, egged on by such organizations as CAIR.
Excerpt #2: “But those who work day in and day out treating the psychological wounds of the country’s warriors say Thursday’s rampage has put a spotlight on the strains of their profession and of the patients they treat.”
Ah, the “psychological wounds” business, which “has put a spotlight on the strains of their profession and of the patients they treat.” I do not wish to make light, I am not making light, of the strains that many in the Army feel, not least among those psychiatrists or other physicians who see the returning soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital. But in the fog of the coverage of Nidal Malik Hasan’s mass-murdering based on the promptings of Islam, the attempt to enroll his story in that of his non-Muslim colleagues, who were under stress of a completely different kind, a kind that has its origin in sympathy for the returning wounded, not in indifference or rather hatred of them, is disturbing, and worse. But apparently anything and everything is possible when one is determined to avoid the obvious.
“Major Hasan was one of a thin line of military therapists trying to hold off a rising tide of need….nightmares, panic attacks…many military professionals, meanwhile, describe crushing schedules with 10 or more patients a day, most struggling with devastating trauma or mutilated bodies that are the product of war and the highly advanced care that kept them alive…some of those hired to heal others end up needing help themselves…”
Again, look at the attempt to paint Major Hasan as just one more brave and overworked military man, indistinguishable from all the rest, just as conscientious, just as concerned, just as splendid a fellow altogether, one of a “thin line”(echoes of that stirring “Thin Red Line” of British military history) of military therapists attempting “to hold off a rising tide of need….nightmares, panic attacks….crushing schedules…devastating trauma…mutilated bodies.” Was he? Was Nidal Malik Hasan deeply disturbed by the sight of Infidel suffering? Or did he, in fact, not only have no sympathy at all for that suffering, but actually engage in arguing with his wounded patients, haranguing them with his own violent views, instead of offering them sympathy of any kind? Any reports on this? Any at all? If he had been a splendid, caring, hardworking psychiatrist, why did he get such bad reports? Why were his colleagues alarmed by him? Why was he transferred far away, to Fort Hood – a standard procedure, apparently, in the military for dealing with such cases. In the case of a Muslim you can bet few were willing to call, as they ought to have, for his prompt dishonorable discharge, accompanied by a further demand that he pay the army back for the sums shelled out for his medical training.
A great deal of nonsense has been written about Nidal Malik Hasan, and about the terrific “stress” he was under. What was that “stress”? It wasn’t the famous “Post-Tramautic Stress Disorder,” or PTSD, that some soldiers, having experienced the terrors of the battlefield, can experience in various degrees. Nidal Malik Hasan served on no battlefields. Nor, apparently, was he stricken, overwhelmed from his sympathetic identification with the terribly-wounded returning soldiers he was supposed to treat, as his assigned task, at Walter Reed Hospital. By all accounts he not only was not sympathetic with these soldiers, but argued with them angrily about the war they had been in, about the value and rightness of their own service. Some military psychiatrists, some military physicians, working at Walter Reed might have been deeply distressed at the wounds suffered by American soldiers. Nidal Malik Hasan was not among them; the spectacle of such suffering, indeed, very likely pleased him. What displeased him, what maddened him, was the thought that any of his Muslim “brothers” in Iraq or Afghanistan might have suffered. That was cause for anxiety. That was cause for fury.
American newspapers are suddenly full of stories about army doctors, army psychiatrists, army therapists, and the truly terrible stresses they are under. Why, on the Front Page of last Sunday’s Times, right next to the story about the health care bill, is one entitled “A MiIitary Therapist’s World: Long Hours Filled With Pain.” Right next to it, on the left, is a companion piece, in every sense, with the title “Preliminary Fort Hood Inquiry Turns Up No Link to Terror Plot.” The story about a military therapist’s world leaves no doubt, none, that it is a wonder that military psychiatrists manage somehow not to become unhinged, not to do the kinds of things people who become unhinged – whatever their background – of course naturally do nowadays, which is to suddenly decide to mass-murder a large group of people, the larger the better. And in case you might for some reason miss the obvious point, the Times writers make it clear: “the terrible stresses on army doctors, and especially on army psychiatrists.” No specific mention is made of Nidal Malik Hasan, and there need be none. An atmosphere is being created, through the fog of newsprint, to make us all dwell suddenly on how difficult, how nearly-inevitably-leading-to-a-crack-up, the profession of army psychiatrist now is. And we can hardly miss the implied point. Nidal Malik Hasan, you see, was just one more military psychiatrist, suffering just the way so many of them do, and he happened to crack. That’s it.
The P.T.S.D. canard subsided, because it was obvious that someone who had never served on the battlefield could not have such a condition attributed to him. So it’s on to the next theme: the theme of the crack-up, a crack-up that can happen “to anyone.” Forget about his deep devotion to Islam. Forget that even at Walter Reed he was ranting about Infidels. Forget the clear and articulate and sensible testimony of Val Finnell, a classmate who studied with Nidal Malik Hasan just a few years ago, and who reports on his clear expression of loyalty to Muslims, not to Americans, and the ferocity of his views. But those views, and that ferocity, are not signs of mental illness. If they were, then one would have to declare many of the Muslim clerics, all over the world, and hundreds of millions of their followers, to be mentally ill. Is that the way out? Is that the last refuge of those who would do anything they could, no matter what, to prevent having to face up to the real, as opposed to the imaginary, contents of Islam? Should we ignore the great scholars of Islam, who spent their lives studying those texts, and the history of islam? Should we collectively decide that the scholarship of C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, Henri Lammens, St. Clair Tisdall, Geoges Vajda, Maxine Rodinson, Sir Henry Muir, David Margoliouth, and dozens of others, are without worth, are null and void, because since they studied and wrote, in that century of mental freedom and lack of inhibition, roughly from 1870 to 1970, somehow Islam has itself changed? Or is it, rather, that we are no longer allowed, we no longer allow ourselves, to be truthful about some things, to see them steadily and whole, and we instead abdicate the field to the Muslims and the non-Muslim apologists for Islam who have so successfully hired and promoted and pushed one another, backed by the sinister and steady deployment of Arab oil money to buy up, in some cases by creating, academic chairs or departments or whole “centers” of Islamic-themed studies? Are we to ignore all of the testimony of such articulate and intelligent apostates – truly, defectors from the Army of Islam even more valuable to us for their testimony than were the defectors from the KGB during the Cold War – such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Magdi Allam, Nonie Darwish, and so many others? Are we to ignore all of this? And are we to ignore the evidence of our own senses, including that of sight, which permits us to read and reread not only the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, but also to read the commentators, Muslim and non-Muslim, on the meaning of those texts? And are we to ignore the history of Islamic conquest, of vast areas of the world, and the subsequent subjugation, the grim fate, of so many different non-Muslim peoples who were first forcibly Islamized and then, in many cases, arabized, losing through cultural and linguistic imperialism a sense of, and appreciation for, their own pre-Islamic histories? How many Pakistanis ever think of the conditions of their Hindu or other non-Muslim ancestors? How many have the slightest interest in the civilisation of Mohenjo-Daro? How many think of India, the Wonder That Was India, Bharat, before or aside from Islam?
But now we have the explanation of Unhingement, of Craziness, of a Man Who Went Mad from all the stress, of this and of that. But he didn’t suddenly go mad. This act was not, as others have said, the sudden result of finding his wife in bed with someone else, one of those crimes of passion that, at least in the Latin countries, were treated with a certain understanding and indulgence. This was premeditated, and based on a deep and abiding hatred, not only for his fellow soldiers, but for the Infidel nation-state in which he was born and raised, and where he and his family were in a sense rescued from the misery and misrule of Muslim societies, including wretched Ramallah, which when his family left it was still under the Jordanians, and after a brief period of semi-decency under the Israelis, has reverted to Muslim misrule under the “Palestinian” Authority. Nidal Malik Hasan and his whole family, and indeed all Muslims permitted to live in Infidel nation-states, whose legal and political institutions are flatly contradicted by the Shari’a and would not last one minute if Muslims intent on spreading Islam until it dominates had their way, should be full of gratitude to this country. They should feel permanent gratitude to the U.S. for allowing them, despite what the ideology of Islam inculcates, to settle here and enjoy the benefits – political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral – of an Infidel society. If they do not deeply and permanently feel such gratitude, there is no reason for us to unnecessarily add to our woes, to allow within our midst to settle those whose presence makes for trouble, makes for danger, makes for unpleasantness, makes for worry. We have plenty to worry about already.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/fitzgerald-major-hasan-and-the-fog-of-war.html
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