Israel Matzav

What Israel can learn from Major Nidal Malik Hassan

One of the most remarkable things about being in the US for the past few days has been the extent to which Americans have been caught off guard by the actions of Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the Muslim who murdered thirteen American soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas last Wednesday. While I doubt that Israelis would have been so surprised had something similar happened among us - God forbid - there are some important lessons to be learned by us from this post by Hugh Fitzgerald.

Yes, Nidal Malik Hasan was an American citizen. And Major Nidal Malik Hasan was a major in the American, Infidel army, and Major Hasan hated the world's Infidels. For he had been taught, since childhood, and he did believe, that they, those Infidels, were at war with innocent Muslims. Infidels, he knew, were the cause of all the world's woe. They were the ones who were fighting innocent Muslims. Never mind that the American army had bombed the Serbs to protect - in its own ignorant and confused fashion - Muslims in Bosnia, had delivered food aid to Somalia and attempted to avert civil war in that country, had been generous in aiding the ferociously-Muslim inhabitants of Aceh after the tsunami, had delivered earthquake aid to Paksitan, had spent two trillion dollars in Iraq to make it a semi-decent place and, what's more, to hold it together, had given Pakistan thirty billion and had just announced it would give that country that is run of, by, and for Muslims, another 7.5 billion. Never mind that the U.S. was shelling out aid to Muslims all over the world and despite every conceivable provocation, treating Muslims inside and outside America with kid gloves that would, with any other enemy, been taken off long ago.

Israel participated in many of the same relief projects that the United States did. We took in Muslim refugees from Bosnia, we provided aid to tsunami-stricken Aceh, we tried to establish relations with Pakistan and Iraq (and we even had people trying to do business in Iraq until the kidnappings started). Does anyone really believe it mattered? Does anyone really believe that if we give the 'Palestinians' a state, the Muslim world will learn to love (or at least tolerate) us and stop trying to destroy us?

Inevitably, some American or European is going to come on here and rip me for stereotyping. For you, no, not all Muslims are terrorists, but all (or nearly all) terrorists are Muslims. And those Muslims who are not terrorists are far less insistent on punishing the terrorists than are Christians or Jews or Buddhists or Hindus. The proof? Guess who constitute the largest number of victims of Muslim terrorism? You guessed it, Muslims.

But we who have bothered to find out what the texts of Islam contain, and what the tenets inculcated by those texts are, know that Major Nidal Hasan was not a Muslim in name only, not a Muslim prepared to ignore much of Islam (even if only out of calculations of temporary self-interest), but was truly devout. He thus could not possibly, though an American citizen, have been an American citizen in the sense of being loyal to America and to the principles of the American Constitution, for that Constitution is, in its letter and spirit, flatly contradicted by the Shari'a.

So it would seem to be obvious that Major Malik Hasan acted on his deepest beliefs. That they are not our beliefs. What we who are not Muslim think of the ideas of Islam that prompt what we call "suicide bombers" or "suicide killers" (and what Muslims call "shahid" or "martyrs") is irrelevant. Yet we, or many of us, still refuse to perform the most obvious of pressing tasks - to learn what Islam contains, instead of continuing to blandly content ourselves with airy references to the "three abrahamic faiths" or to rely on such notions as "all religions are essentially the same" or even to lazily agree that Islam is accurately described merely as a "religion" when, in fact, it is a Total Belief-System unlike any "religion" or any other "religion" on earth. It is a Total Belief-System in the claims it makes on its adherents, on its clear politics and geopolitics - that is, its organization of all power, within a society or state, and its claim to rightfully dominate the entire world. It views this as a rightful claim which only the obstinacy or malevolence of Infidels refuses to accept, as they refuse to accept a faith that is suffused with violence, that teaches the uses of violence, that describes the fruits of those successful in the practice of violence, that offers a worldview in which violence in the end decides (along with the practice of what Muhammad himself defined as the essence of War -deception) who will be Victor and who will be Vanquished.

Read the whole thing. And stop fooling yourselves. It's not paranoia when they really do hate you.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:50 PM