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The God Blog

November 15, 2009 | 4:47 pm

‘Going Muslim’ the new ‘going postal’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Varadarajan

Tunku Varadarajan is no journalistic lightweight. A former managing editor for the Wall Street Journal, the clinical professor of business at NYU made an argument in his Forbes column last week that probably left most Muslim Americans, not to mention many non-Muslim Americans, feeling really, really uncomfortable.

In the wake of the alleged rampage by Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan at Fort Hood, Varadarajan suggests adding a new phrase to the American lexicon—“going Muslim.”

He wrote:

This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage—the camouflage of integration—in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of “harassment” as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not “snap” in the “postal” manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away—to a neighbor—a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious “departure.”

We are a civilized society. One of our cardinal rules of coexistence is that we (try always to) judge people only by their actions and not by their identity, whether racial, religious or sexual. This is our great strength as a society, and also, in the present circumstances, our great weakness: How to address the threat posed by the fact that, of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in our midst, there are a few (perhaps many more than a few) who are so radicalized that they would kill their fellow Americans?

Talk about fear-mongering. Just hammers home that the reaction of Muslim Americans to domestic terror in the name of Allah must be incredibly similar to the Jewish response to gonifs like Bernard Madoff.

Ali Eteraz shared one such example from a Muslim writer for the Daily Kos. The headline sums up the sentiment: “F**k you Nidal Malik Hasan.”

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There is a big difference (what an understatement!) in the actions of Hasan and Madoff.

Madoff was a sociopath without a conscience. He coldly and fraudulently exploited the trust of personal and communal relationships for his personal gain. He never claimed to defraud anyone as a Jewish act, never claimed to speak for Jews and was not supportd by anyone except a phony troublemaker on this blog.

Hasan was honest and transparent. He told everyone that he was a Muslim before an American, and promoted the radical Islamic agenda. Hasan considered what he did to be a good deed, the will of Allah as transmiitted through Muhammed, an idealistic act. Hasan had no personal animus to his victims, and nothing personal to gain from his actions.

In that he had the explicit support and praise of his American-born and educated radical imam Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki from Yemen, who says on his website “Fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today ... The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.” and “The bullets of the fighters of Afghanistan and Iraq are a reflection of the feelings of the Muslims towards America”.

Even the reaction in Saudi Arabia by Sheik Salman al-Awdah were “unjustified,” “irrational” and “inadvisable” because it will cause a backlash against Muslims in America and Europe. Like, is that the problem here? Not because it is evil or against the intention of Allah.

I think these people know more about the mindset of Islam than Ali Eteraz, and are more representative of Islamic thought.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 11/16/09 at 12:13 am

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