"go to war and return as a shell of your former self"

reads a bit different than "be all you can be."

The other conversation we need to have is how Islam encourages extreme violence against "infidels" and women and children.

The third conversation we need to have is Barack "my Muslim religion" Obama's frightening, freakish response to the Ft. Hood tragedy:

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/politics/A-Disconnected-President.html

There are many Americans who see clearly, who protested against both of Bush's wars, and who feel great compassion for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem is that we are in the minority, and we are ignored by the corporate media. What Major Hassan did was a horrific tragedy, and I am not excusing him in any way. Yet, those who persecuted him, and put great pressure on him, must share in responsibility for the consequences. There is much prejudice in the military, especially toward muslims, and ignorance and arrogance have always been rampant. Major Hassan could not control his rage, and so it brought him to ruin. We can use this experience as a lesson, and work to release our own anger and prejudice, and refuse to be a part of this cycle of hate.

One of the first and most important parts of military training is learning how to kill. That's what the military does. The military is very good at training both officers and enlisted. The taboo against killing is usually nonexistent after a couple of weeks of training.

"Be met in the way that an Army veteran in these times inevitably is: with an absence of gratitude"

Judging by all the "support the troops" emails I get from my chickenhawk friends, absence of gratitude is not a problem. I read it never was, not even during Vietnam. That it is just a conservative ploy to bash liberals. In the service during the sixties, I was never confronted with that nor were any of my buddies when we returned home. On the other hand conservatives have been busy taking away any benefits from returning soldiers that they can. This is real absence of gratitude from conservatives.

For many years, one of the most popular t-shirts around U.S. military bases has been the one that screams, "Kill Them All -- Let God Sort Them Out!"

Malcolm X's comment after JFK was killed: "The chickens are coming home to roost."

Every day, the novels of Don DeLillo seem more prescient.

Here is what the Qur’an says:

‘You may fight in the cause of God against those who fight you, but DO NOT INITIATE AGGRESSION. God does not love transgressors.’ (Quran; 2.190)

“O ye who believe! be steadfast firmly for God, as witnesses to fair dealing, Let NOT a group’s hostility to you cause you to deviate from JUSTICE. Be JUST, for it is closer to piety. Be God conscious; for God is Well Aware of what you do.” (Quran; 5-8 )

“To those against whom war is made, PERMISSION is given (to fight back), because they are wronged; and verily, God is most powerful for their aid; (They are) those who have been expelled from their homes in defiance of right,-(for no cause) except that they say, our Lord is God”. (Quran; 22:39-40)

"O mankind! We created you from a single soul, male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another. Truly, the most honoured of you in God’s sight is the greatest of you in righteousness. God is All-Knowing, All-Aware". (49.13)

“And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the variations in your languages and your colours: verily in that are Signs for those who know”.(30-22)

======================================================

Islam according to teaching of the Qur'an says that when you are occupied, attacked, unable to negotiate constructively and effectively; when you are prevented from living your life in a dignified and free manner, then and ONLY then you have the PERMISSION to fight back

.

EXCEPT that by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, none have to execute an illegal order and the whole EIGHT YEARS has been a monument and a collage of such orders, starting with NO Constitutional declaration of war. They're dupes, not troops.

There can't be any broad based political "reckoning with ourselves" in the USA, until we have a mainstream news media that is at least halfway committed to:

...reporting meaningfully competing versions of facts
...keeping versions of facts, in turn, separate from strictly-normative overviews
...providing a balance of normative overviews so that dissent is never heard routinely-less than official opinion.

These are standards the public must want and demand its media to move toward, not that such standards can ever be reached perfectly.

A major reason we keep fighting Vietnam-like wars is that the MSM doesn't even try to operate this way -- and the public can no longer even conceive of making this an issue in itself.

Sheth: "Maj. Nadal Hasan was facing an existential crisis of already knowing his fate: go to war and return as a shell of your former self."

Wow. That is extremely well put. Our soldiers are constantly placed in just that position. However, I think there is more to this than Hasan's professional understanding:

When the full information comes out, I believe we'll see an example of a man who was, first and foremost, incredibly lonely. This is someone who clearly WANTS to be married, but ISN'T at 39. Let me guess: "MUSLIM, intelligent, lonely, MD on cusp of middle-age seeks same" How much of Hasan's loneliness was Hasan's fault for excluding 90% of the American female population on the basis of religion?

Second, and not less important, this man was proud to be Muslim, upset about his countries position toward some Muslim countries, and... MOST IMPORTANT, possibly TARGETED by his superiors for his vocal anti-US stance on Iraq and Afghanistan. This factor is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT because of what it says for many of us posting on CommonDreams. COULD WE BE SIMILARLY TARGETTED??? At Walter Reed, this MD was demoted from his residency despite many years of experience and promotions up the ranks. WHY? And how would many of us respond to such a career-busting event? If you get essentially fired from your cushy position at Walter Reed and demoted to Fort Hood for eventual deployment to Afghanistan, what does this do to your already pathetic attempts at finding romance?? What happened to all the 'little Hasans' you would have imagined when you became that most enviable of American professions: a DOCTOR??? What do you tell the parents who slaved, and no doubt, endured insults at their store, to help you become a biochemist??? HOW DO YOU RATIONALIZE YOUR FATE??? What if you understand that you're fvcked up in the head, and the ARMY won't let you get out of your job, a job that has turned against you?? What if you're stuck??

If officials at Walter Reed are found to have fvcked with this guys career over his anti-war stance, then I hope they are found and demoted and sent to Afghanistan themselves. They share a burden of guilt over pushing him toward 'going postal'.

Everyone knows, torture eventually works. It breaks you to the point where you will do any desperate thing you can think of to end the torture. Maybe that's what happened to Hasan. But, part of his torture was self-inflicted.

Our conservative brethren spend much of their breath trying to convince the rest of us that they really don't care about other human beings. "Let the 'invisible hand' take care of it, your suffering isn't really happening, cuz its not happening to me." But, by the time someone has gotten to the point of killing 13 other human beings, they may be on to something. Whatever reason Hasan had for taking the actions he did, and whatever remedial actions are taken at Walter Reed and elsewhere to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, he deserves to fry for what he did. We don't, fundamentally, need to know why he did it. We shouldn't fall over ourselves to 'understand his pain'. Indeed, when the scales of 'injustice' are rebalanced as painfully as he did the other day, seeking 'understanding' is more damaging than it needs to be. For reasons not understood, this guy decided to become a mass-murderer. Those reasons should die with him. In some fundamental way, he deserves to die as misunderstood as he lived. In an ironic and fundamental way, he earned it.

The extreme right views of some ex-military and probably some current military are likely to use this tradgedy as a mechanism to undermine the president's legitimacy as commander in chief. This is poison to the republic. Additionally, how is any truth to be obtained, er compelled from the MIC? The spinsters would have us distracted by the terrorism angle and allah ahkbar verbiage.

Islam has a fundamental conflict with nation-states, in that nation-states require their soldiers to kill. Historically, some Muslim rulers got around the can't-kill problem by raising armies of non-Muslim eunichs. That's not really a solution, as the Muslim leader has to order his troops into battle.

Al-Qaeda tries its best to ignore this aspect of Islam.

Another religion has a similar problem -- Christianity. Jesus had nothing good to say about being a soldier. "All who live by the sword shall surely die by the sword." This is an ancient cannon fodder argument. Nor are soldiers presented in a good light. They are Herod's baby-killer legion, and Pilate's soldiers are the torturers of the Lamb of God. "If a soldier commands you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two." This action would drive the Roman courts crazy, as by law a soldier could only command a peasant to carry his pack 1 mile. Then we get to "Thou Shall Not Kill".

Through all this, the military trains its own sky pilots who bless the troops. Then the troops struggle in their minds with how they pulled the trigger and various people died or were tortured. None of the religions soothe the troops' nerves completely -- it's not just Islam.

In the US, it was not the public as a whole that put these soldiers in harm's way, it was the corporate-government complex. Unfortunately, since the mass media are part of this complex that recruited a large fraction of the US populace to support these wars, many in the US are convinced the US military serves the people, instead of who it really serves.

Robert E Lee is considered an honorable man because he betrayed his country to fight for the institution of slavery, and led a fight that killed 600K white Americans. And he is still a hero of the cadets at West Point. What Hasan did pales compared to what Lee did; is he a villain because he killed for the freedom of people from foreign oppression and violence, and not slavery?

Even the author of this article, while discussing the psychological and physical costs to the members of the US military, refuses to acknowledge the much, much greater costs borne by the peoples under attack overseas.

There wasn't anything for this Old Indian to reckon with at all regarding the whole situation. I am not involved in any of their wars at all. I am not involved in any Religious Wars upon the earth.

I've had Christians try to "Convert" me to their Religion, and I told them, No.

I said to them Jesus said to the Religious Political Pharisee's that they would travel 100 miles to find one "Convert" & then turn them into a child of hell 1000 times worse than they.

Then they look at me kind of strange.

I've had other "Religions" try to "Convert" me, too. Same answer, No.

Had every known political party try to "Convert" me. Tell them all, No.

I always love when someone starts trying to "Convert" me to something. They'll have about as much luck as the Religious Political Pharisees & other factions of Israel had in trying to "Convert" Jesus to their politics & religion.

I am just on my journey through this world trying my best to be of no harm to any person as the human race is already way more than good enough at harming one another.

Life is good. What an experience! It's always best to forgive.

"Instead, the nation's presses ran the tape on mass murderers"
Wait a second, isn't he a mass murderer?

"By Friday evening: ... someone who was filmed on a `security camera' (somehow linking his presence to illegal activity)"
Wait a second once more. I thought that he is linked (somehow) to illegal activity. Silly me.

Falguni, it's a little hard to buy your point of view. After we put our own people at risk to save Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, we are attacked by Muslims who kill 3,000 Americans, after which people are dancing in the streets all over the Middle East. You're going to have a hard time convincing some of us, at least, that we should feel guilty or responsible for being hated by Muslims therefore we should, hmm, do what, surrender America?

My friend, I can understand a friend in need, but point a gun at me, my family, or my country, and I will kill you. It's coming to that, sadly.

"Major Nadal Hasan was facing an existential crisis of already knowing his fate: go to war and return as a shell of your former self."

Perhaps Hasan did define the existential choice that way. I suspect, however, that after he had heard the stories of multiple returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans during his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed, he might have defined the moral dilemma a little differently.

What sorts of things do you suppose those returning vets were verbalizing to Hasan in their sessions? Hatred of Muslims. Visceral dislike of Iraqi people, Afghan people, Iraqi culture, Afghan culture. Intense, generalized anger over the death of fallen comrades, with revenge fantasies. Tales of atrocities witnessed, and/or involvement in actual war crimes. Would not these be the sorts of things that soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder would be likely to share with their assigned shrink at Walter Reed?

In that context, what Major Hasan was confronting was the impending prospect of enabling the killers of brown skinned Muslims to cope with the killing of brown skinned Muslims so that yet more brown skinned Muslims could be killed. Hasan finally snapped as his options to avoid overseas deployment into that theatre of the absurd ran out, perhaps falling susceptible to the phenomenon known as committing suicide by cop.

No one may ever be able to learn with confidence, or sort out and weigh, the underlying, competing motivations lying behind the mass murder last week at Fort Hood. Perhaps it wasn't so much that Hasan was fearful about returning from war a shell of is former self. Maybe he was far more fearful that the Army had, alas, turned him into something terribly grotesque, a tool of the professionalized western war machine.

Regardless, so much for the slogan "Be all that you can be." It's the demagogues frantically salivating to spin this dreadful crime as an act of anti-American terrorism that we should be most worried about.

Bill from Saginaw

Is Professor Sheth responding to these? This is a weird article.

Of course, the problem with this sort of article is that it can easily look foolish in a couple of weeks. We have no idea what motivated this person. Professor Sheth, at least, has no idea, unless she's inside the investigation or closely connected to those involved with the investigatory wing. Maybe it was religious extremism, maybe it was existential despair, maybe he was in a fit of psychosis, maybe maybe maybe. To write such a self-righteous, strident piece the day or two after...ridiculous and, frankly, irresponsible. Will Professor Sheth write a retraction piece if in fact he was involved with religious extremist groups, acting in concert with them? Doubtful. She isn't even responding to comments on her own piece.

A previous comment makes great points, to which the professor should respond: he is in fact a mass murderer (unless you're saying he was framed) and was involved in criminal activity. Both of those facts make some of this rhetoric laughable.

Get off your high horse. Sometimes people do awful things and it doesn't confirm all of your talking points against the war.