This is more my point -- the speculation and rumor-mongering. There's been a lot made of Maj. Hasan as a Muslim and some have taken this information to suggest that he may've been working for Al-Qaeda. This seems to have a lot to do with what I recently talked about, Mr. Douthat and his blanket conceptualization of Muslims as "the enemy."
Just stop. Things will be figured out but "Islamic writings on his door" (by which I assume they mean "Arabic writing" since Islam isn't a language) and him saying something in Arabic don't mean anything except that he's a Muslim.
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Oh, and 1 more thing. After 4/16 and Northern Illinois, there's a lot of talk about letting students carry guns. Hasan was stopped by a cop. Others may've been firing though, trying to stop the rampage and here's what happened:
Officials were looking into whether some soldiers may have been shot accidentally by others trying to shoot the gunman. Investigators are analyzing "all the rounds, the trajectories, all the weapons, all the shots, where they came from," said Col. John Rossi, deputy commanding general at Fort Hood. "That will be determined by the investigators."And these were soldiers, with extensive firearms training.
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And an unarmed Sean Bell was shot in New York by trained policemen.
Also: workplace shootings don't have anything to do with Islam. They're as American as apple pie.
see the workplace shooting in Orlando...
Thanks, Matt. You might want to check out Bitch, PhD's post on this -- it includes Dr Phil making sense!
Seriously, though, this is one of the things I'd like to see tackled more. I was listening to two of our staff people talking about this today, and one of them had been stationed at Fort Hood. And the person was talking about how "you just don't trust anybody who's brown. It's not racism, you'd do the same if it was blue-eyed people who was killing all your friends."
Except we wouldn't.
My mother and I had a long go-round about this today. I think part of the problem is that most Americans think Islam calls Muslims to kill Americans. Well, radical Islam might... but most Muslims aren't radical. So my mother responds, "They are called to kill the infidels, and WE (meaning westerners) are the infidels." And this is where my mother gets one of my history lectures about people of the Book, the founding of Islam, and how Christians and Jews are not "infidels". Why don't the media take some time to educate Americans rather than perpetuate the myths? I guess the truth doesn't sell.
Amy
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