Yesterday's shooting spree by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood affected me greatly. Usually I take tragic news more or less in stride, but this incident is so disturbing on so many levels that I've found myself looking at every bit of news I can get my hands on and turning the implications over in my head. The deepest and most immediate part of this tragedy, of course, is the fact that 13 American servicemembers are dead, killed on their own nation's soil as they prepared to deploy to war. At a time when our military is fighting two foreign wars characterized by unpredictable violence and insurgent tactics, to have this type of attack occur on the supposedly safe and friendly ground of an Army base is doubly horrifying. I can't even fathom the anger and pain that active-duty servicemembers, veterans, and their families are feeling in response to these murders, particularly given all the misinformation and speculation swirling around in the first hours of the attack.
Adding to that, we've got to deal with the fact that the shooter was, by all appearances, a religiously devout Muslim. Pretty much as soon as Hasan's name leaked out, when the inital reports were that he had been killed, political fault lines were forming over this issue. Broadly speaking, (and it should be noted that plenty of commentators across the ideological spectrum either refrained from weighing in due to lack of evidence or took a measured and appropriate tone in their analysis) the tack from liberal commentators was that Hasan's religion shouldn't be assumed as the motive for the attacks and the tack from conservatives was that Hasan is clearly a terrorist and that politically correct cowardice is making America vulnerable to Islamic extremism.
To put it bluntly, both of these general arguments make me extremely uncomfortable. As far as the first goes, it seems extremely likely that Hasan's religious beliefs played a substantial role in his actions. Even excluding the very real recent and historical phenomenon of acts of violence being committed as an affirmation of Islamic faith, what are the odds that a man as religiously devout as Hasan appears to have been would commit such an extreme act if he believed it to be at odds with his spiritual beliefs? His religion is absolutely fair game in this discussion, and I think it's disingenuous and false to pretend otherwise.
However, to address the other line of thought, just because Hasan's Islamic beliefs played a major role in this shooting doesn't mean that he committed the shooting because he was a Muslim. This in an important distinction to make for several reasons. First, there's a substantial strain of post 9/11 conservative thought that holds that Islam as an entity is the cultural enemy of the United States and that this idea should be an explicit cornerstone of the "war on terrorism." Note, for instance, the opening of this blog on the Fort Hood shootings: "The moment I first heard about the mass murders at Fort Hood I knew in my bones that the shooter or shooters were Muslims." One of the more extreme exemplars of this line of 'thinking' is Michelle Malkin's 2004 book In Defense of Internment, which offers up a retroactive justification for the WWII policy of detaining Japanese citizens on the basis of their ethnic background by way of advocating for racial profiling to be actively deployed to combat terrorism on American soil.
Unlike some on the left, I think that the U.S. government and American culture on the whole have on balance done a commendable job of clearly identifying the violent and totalitarian strains of Islam, rather than the religion as a whole, as the target of anti-terrorism efforts, the Afghanistan invasion, and the fight against the Iraqi insurgency. I believe that this is a reflection on the long tradition of religious freedom in America and is a major reason why our country hasn't had nearly the problems with organized radicalism and backlash from the Islamic population that areas of Europe have experienced in the time since 9/11. It's also the right decision on a tactical level: overt or covert declarations that America is the enemy of Islam only serve to reinforce the similar claims made by al-Qaeda types in their vile recruitment pitches, and there remains beside the small matter of the impracticality of declaring open hostility on an ideology with well over a billion adherents. But it's a nuanced position that can be difficult to maintain, particularly since there's a vocal segment of the American population who openly defines patriotism as being synonymous with evangelical Christian faith, and violent attacks perpetuated by Muslims on domestic soil can test it mightily in the eyes of the public. Conservative writer Reihan Salam has a great piece about this that's well worth reading.
The investigation into Hasan will hopefully clear some of this up, particularly on the question of whether he had any verifiable links to terrorist groups. My sense, based on the limited facts available, is that he was essentially an isolated and embittered man who became disenchanted with his job and his life, and in response immersed himself in the idea that the U.S. military was persecuting him personally and Islam generally. The shootings themselves feel sort of like a hybrid of a terrorist act and a suicide-by-cop; I have no idea which was foremost in Hasan's mind, but I suppose eventually we'll know more.
The final thing that disturbs me about the Ft. Hood shootings is the speculation about Hasan's role as a mental health provider who worked with soldiers suffering from PTSD. I've already seen at least two articles (here and here) claiming that Hasan may have been suffering from 'vicarious traumatization' from dealing with PTSD sufferers, that he may have had PTSD himself as a result, and that this may have been a factor in his rampage. This is an idea that needs to get smacked down as quickly and decisively as humanly possible.
First of all, treating PTSD or having interactions with PTSD sufferers is NOT in itself traumatic. Trauma is specifically defined as exposure to an event involving actual or threatened death or serious injury to a person or witnessing another person being exposed to same, and reacting with intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Listening to a person talk about trauma is NOT dangerous, and therefore cannot be traumatic. It can be very stressful, but stress is not the same thing as trauma. I have no doubt that Hasan was deeply affected by the stories he heard from the soldiers under his care (and the way, he was almost certainly not conducting psychotherapy with the soldiers under his care, because modern psychiatrists almost exclusively concern themselves with medication prescription and management) but he did not develop PTSD as a result of his work.
This is an unfathomably important point to make because the PTSD syndrome is based partially on how the sufferer reacts to his or her memories of the trauma as being potentially as harmful as the traumatic event itself. The gold-standard psychotherapies for PTSD derive much of their effectiveness from helping PTSD sufferers understand that their memories cannot hurt them and desensitizing them to their emotional power. If because of this incident the military and the public come to the utterly mistaken conclusion that talking about traumatic events can traumatize listeners or "give them" PTSD, that belief will absolutely impair our ability as a society to help those suffering from PTSD seek help and recover from the disorder. The very last thing that PTSD sufferers need is more reinforcement for the idea that their memories are dangerous to themselves and others, or another repetition of the overblown and inaccurate stereotype that PTSD 'causes' people to go on murder sprees.
I hope that many of these concerns don't come to pass, just as I hope that this tragic event gets the attention that it deserves. I'll definitely be following this story closely.
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