Butters
Senior Airman
Reducing the complexity of the world to a bold and simple black-and-white cartoon may be very emotionally satisfying, but it ain't gonna be of much use if your goal is to find a means of identifying potentially dangerous people so as to prevent them from carrying out violent acts. For that job, you have to recognize and deal with the cold, hard facts in as objective a manner as possible.
Slapping a label on Hasan will not explain why he, an American-born and raised Muslim who has clearly demonstrated his intelligence and diligence by becoming both a doctor and an officer in the US military, chose to carry out a premeditated act of mass murder against his fellow soldiers. The bare fact that he was a Muslim is not a sufficient explanation for his actions. There are, after all, well over a million other Muslims in the US, and all these people are not running around slaughtering innocent people. So why did this particular Muslim act so differently from the vast majority of his fellow Muslim Americans?
That's the question that needs to be answered if you want to prevent similar atrocities in the future. Making bogus claims that your ideological opponents are implicit accomplices in this crime is not only slanderous, it's down right ludicrous. I'm probably as disdainful of PC as anyone here, but I also know that it wasn't PC that killed those people. Hasan did. And the moral responsibility for his actions are his alone. Just as pro-gun, anti-federalist Tomothy McVeigh was solely responsible for his slaughter of innocent people. Because despite their psychological deviations, neither men were/are 'insane' by the definitional criteria of law or medicine. They may have believed that their actions were justified by their twisted moral beliefs, but they also clearly knew that what they were planning to do was both legally and morally 'wrong' by the standards of their society. IOW, the explanatory fact that both men were clearly mental deviants does not a priori absolve them of the personal moral/legal responsibility for their actions. Because an explanation is NOT a justification.
The bogus conflation of explanation and justification is rife in this thread. Many here are outraged at what they perceive to be an ideological agenda to excuse Hasan of moral responsibility. However, while skepticism of explanatory psychological/sociological claims , ie: 'Pre-PTSD' etc, is completely justified, the wide-spread belief that those claims are in and of themselves, 'justifications', is not. The explanations may or may not be valid to some degree, but they do not, regardless of their possible validity, absolve Hasan of responsibility. That is an entirely separate issue. To be decided by the court that tries him. It is up to them to examine the various evidence and explanations, and to decide whether they are relevant to the legal and moral issues involved.
Whether Hasan qualifies for the label of 'terrorist', is ultimately irrelevant. If he is, he certainly wasn't a very devious one. What I've read about him leads me to speculate that while he may have decided to go out in a murderous blaze of Islamist 'glory' in emulation of Islamist terrorists, the reason that he chose to do so had more to do with his FU'ed personality than the bare fact that he was born into a Muslim family. 20/20 hindsight reveals that he also fits the profile of many other alienated and paranoid misfit loners who became mass murderers. In any case, he is too complex to be usefully explained by a simple word.
JL
Slapping a label on Hasan will not explain why he, an American-born and raised Muslim who has clearly demonstrated his intelligence and diligence by becoming both a doctor and an officer in the US military, chose to carry out a premeditated act of mass murder against his fellow soldiers. The bare fact that he was a Muslim is not a sufficient explanation for his actions. There are, after all, well over a million other Muslims in the US, and all these people are not running around slaughtering innocent people. So why did this particular Muslim act so differently from the vast majority of his fellow Muslim Americans?
That's the question that needs to be answered if you want to prevent similar atrocities in the future. Making bogus claims that your ideological opponents are implicit accomplices in this crime is not only slanderous, it's down right ludicrous. I'm probably as disdainful of PC as anyone here, but I also know that it wasn't PC that killed those people. Hasan did. And the moral responsibility for his actions are his alone. Just as pro-gun, anti-federalist Tomothy McVeigh was solely responsible for his slaughter of innocent people. Because despite their psychological deviations, neither men were/are 'insane' by the definitional criteria of law or medicine. They may have believed that their actions were justified by their twisted moral beliefs, but they also clearly knew that what they were planning to do was both legally and morally 'wrong' by the standards of their society. IOW, the explanatory fact that both men were clearly mental deviants does not a priori absolve them of the personal moral/legal responsibility for their actions. Because an explanation is NOT a justification.
The bogus conflation of explanation and justification is rife in this thread. Many here are outraged at what they perceive to be an ideological agenda to excuse Hasan of moral responsibility. However, while skepticism of explanatory psychological/sociological claims , ie: 'Pre-PTSD' etc, is completely justified, the wide-spread belief that those claims are in and of themselves, 'justifications', is not. The explanations may or may not be valid to some degree, but they do not, regardless of their possible validity, absolve Hasan of responsibility. That is an entirely separate issue. To be decided by the court that tries him. It is up to them to examine the various evidence and explanations, and to decide whether they are relevant to the legal and moral issues involved.
Whether Hasan qualifies for the label of 'terrorist', is ultimately irrelevant. If he is, he certainly wasn't a very devious one. What I've read about him leads me to speculate that while he may have decided to go out in a murderous blaze of Islamist 'glory' in emulation of Islamist terrorists, the reason that he chose to do so had more to do with his FU'ed personality than the bare fact that he was born into a Muslim family. 20/20 hindsight reveals that he also fits the profile of many other alienated and paranoid misfit loners who became mass murderers. In any case, he is too complex to be usefully explained by a simple word.
JL
