“Everyone else just sat down there and drunk their beer and looked at him and giggled at him,” the woman said, starting to cry. “They just would laugh at him when he walked down with his Muslim clothes. . . . He was mistreated. He didn’t have nobody. He was all alone. He went to his apartment there and was all alone.” – Washington Post

Investigators knock on doors of Hasan's neighbors at Ft. Hood TX

The pervasive racism toward Muslims in the military is obviously at the heart of why Nidal Malik Hasan went to the breaking point. This is all too familiar as we have seen with the kids at Columbine.

“In mid-August, just a few weeks after moving to Killeen, Texas USA, Hasan had a run-in with a soldier living in apartment No. 12. One night after he had been drinking, John Van de Walker scraped a key along the full length of the passenger’s side of Hasan’s car. Then he removed and destroyed a bumper sticker that read, ‘Allah is Love,’ according to several residents, including live-in managers John and Alice Thompson.”

Troops at Fort Hood in the aftermath of the shooting.

The U.S. military has a long standing policy of racism toward the peoples of countries we are “at war with.”. It is standard procedure to dehumanize these foreign populations so that soldiers can more easily deal with the rampant death of innocent people that they see in war. I use the term racism loosely here as it actually applies to the Muslim religion. But few make the distinction between the Muslim religion and Arab ethnicity.

Hasan was known to his comrades in his apartment complex as “number 9″, a reference to his apartment number. Many are calling him a terrorist because he is a Muslim, and in the context of the wars against Muslim nations that we are engaged in. Has Tim McVeigh ever been called a terrorist? Perhaps. But that hasn’t given white middle-state Americans the stigma of terrorism.

I think Hasan has a lot more in common with Timothy McVeigh than he does with Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan. They are (or were) both U.S. military members who were disgruntled enough with the military to retaliate and kill innocent victims.

Every religion has the concept that people should not kill. We don’t know for sure and probably never will, but in addition to be driven to the brink by the incessant tormenting he suffered, I believe it was this devotion to his religion that may have lead him to open fire upon deploying troops to an unjust war that dehumanizes and kills the innocent as a matter of policy. But that is purely my conjecture in trying to explain the unexplainable. Killing is not justified in civilian life or even in war when the innocent die. But this may help to explain what happened, why it happened, how it might have been prevented, and could be prevented in the future.

The BBC reports that Hasan had long wanted to leave the military due to suffering harassment because of his religion, and that many Muslims in the U.S. military suffer harassment and this shooting has raised fears among them:

According to the Pentagon, there are 3,572 Muslims in active service. However, some Muslims in the military say the real number is as high as 20,000.

The US government has made no secret of the fact that it would like to see more people from Arab and Muslim communities joining the armed forces.

More American Muslim troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan has long been seen as a vital part in helping the US in its missions to win hearts and minds in those countries.

“They are a great asset to the army,” Lt Col Nathan Banks, army spokesman for the Pentagon, told the BBC.

“When they do deploy they help facilitate a lot of our missions. American Muslims in the army work hand in hand with local Muslims, and we welcome that.”

He said the army did not foresee heightened tensions within its ranks as a result of Fort Hood. Meanwhile tensions have risen sharply around the country, as we see on internet posts like this one, where many accuse Hasan of being a terrorist, sympathetic to the Muslims we fight against. This BBC article also reports that Muslims in the U.S. military now have a growing fear of harassment as a result. It’s obviously very hard for people to distinguish between Muslims in general (including those in our own military) and the Muslims we fight as members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Hasan likely suffered from secondary PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in listening to the many troops’ horrid stories of war as they came to him after returning from war. Fort Hood Private Michael Kern who knew of Hasan tells of his own problems dealing with his killing a child, and how stories like this had to effect Hasan. Hasan had tried in vain to leave the military but there was no way once you are deployed as the private says.

Hasan’s cousin tells Amy Goodman, “About a week before the incident, he hired a lawyer in order to leave the Army, get married, and live his life. But they rejected his request and asked him to go to Afghanistan. This was the biggest shock for him. So, there

Highlight any portion you want: