Nidal Malik Hasan

Major Nidal Malik Hasan went nuts and killed a bunch of people at Fort Hood. The initial reports are urging people not to jump to conclusions. I mean, with a name like Nidal Malik Hasan, it takes an incredible amount of self-restraint not to jump to the conclusion, "White Aryan Nation" or "Montana Militia".

Obviously.

There were some signs leading up to this, which might have caused some to wonder.

From the Times:

His name appears above radical internet postings praising Islamic suicide bombers — something that the FBI was alerted to six months ago.

He had frequent arguments with soldiers at Fort Hood because of his declarations that fellow Muslims “should stand up and fight against the aggressor”, and his vocal opposition to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He even appeared to celebrate the shooting dead of a soldier at an army recruiting centre in Arkansas in June, carried out by a Muslim convert. He said at the time that Muslims should strap on suicide bombs and detonate them in Times Square.

From The Scotsman, we see why people may not have called his behavior to anyone's attention.

FORT Hood killer Major Nidal Malik Hasan expressed political views that troubled his fellow soldiers, but may not have been reported for fear of them being accused of anti-Muslim feeling.
....
...in the months leading up to shooting spree that also left 29 people wounded, Hasan raised eyebrows with comments that the war on terror was "a war on Islam" and wrestled with what to tell fellow Muslim solders who had their doubts about fighting in Islamic countries.
....
"The system is not doing what it's supposed to do," said Dr Val Finnell, who complained to administrators at a military university about what he considered Hasan's "anti-American" rants. "He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out."

Finnell studied with Hasan from 2007-8 in the master's programme in public health at the military's Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, where Hasan persistently complained about perceived anti-Muslim sentiment in the military and injected his politics into courses where they had no place.

"In retrospect, I'm not surprised he did it," Finnell said of the shootings. "I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were."

Melanie Philips calls it Jihadi Denial Syndrome.

...people are still suggesting that he just snapped -- possibly under the impact of, wait for it, post-traumatic stress arising from military conflict. In other words, he was not a religious fanatic but was merely deranged. But religious fanatics are deranged. How else to describe the people who cut off the heads of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg and so many others; or who strapped suicide bomb belts onto hundreds of Iranian children to turn them into human bombs against the Iraqis; or who want to murder thousands of their fellow British citizens because the Islamists ‘love death’?

Oh I forgot; they are all just resistance fighters against Israeli oppression.

One really has to wonder, looking at this reaction to the fanatic psychiatrist whom the US authorities employed to counsel their soldiers, just who really needs the clinical treatment here.

See also, A Liberal View of the Shooting at Fort Hood
Islam Had Everything to do with Fort Hood
British Muslims Approve of Muslim Soldiers Killing Fellow Troops
In Search of Hasan's Syndrome
and Facts Leak Out.