Nor it seems can the liberal mainstream media.
I was watching BBC’s Newsnight when the story broke of a killing spree at a Texas military base and instantly wondered – as I’m sure did 99.99 per cent of its other viewers – whether this had anything to do with the Religion of Peace. Then a news update came in that the suspect’s name was ‘Hasan’. But the BBC’s reporter hastened to reassure us that there was “no evidence” to suggest this was an act of “terrorism”. Phew! Perish the unworthy thought.
Even today, the MSM is treading on eggshells regarding the killer’s possible motivation.
Here’s the Independent:
A motive for the shooting was hard to pin down last night. However, there were reports that Hasan, who was trained also in psychiatry and medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, was preparing for deployment to Iraq and was not happy to be going there. He had previously worked at the Walter Reed veterans hospital outside Washington.
Yeah, that would be it. You don’t want to be deployed to a combat zone so you do what any sane officer does under the circumstances. Not resign your commission obviously, but tool yourself up and take out a dozen a so of your unarmed comrades.
The BBC’s website takes a similar line, though it does at least (presumably in breach of all BBC guidelines) cheekily slip in the “M” word:
It is not clear what motivated the attacker, named as 39-year-old military psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan.
But some reports said the US-born Muslim was unhappy about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Interesting use of that word “unhappy”, mind.
The Guardian meanwhile, has a brave stab at the ‘trauma-crazed war vet goes tonto’ line, with the help of one of Hasan’s relatives:
One of Hasan’s cousins, Nader Hasan, told reporters the major was dreading going to war, having counselled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Next to the story, it provides a link to the story of another US veteran – Sergeant John Russell – who did just that, killing 5 of his comrades in May. Unfortunately, as it is forced to admit in a more detailed analysis, can’t have been traumatised by combat because, er….
He was not a soldier returning from deployment in either Iraq or Afghanistan, suffering from stress or combat fatigue. Hasan, although 39 years old, has never served in a war zone.
But that doesn’t stop the Guardian speculating desperately:
Instead, his horror of war came secondhand. He was a psychiatrist who listened to the harrowing stories of his comrades at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC, and latterly at Fort Hood, Texas.
Ah yes that will be it. A bit like passive smoking, the Major was suffering from passive combat stress.
My favourite example of liberal squeamishness, though, comes from the New York Times. Sure towards the bottom of its report, it manages to slip in such not-altogether-irrelevant details as Hasan’s former imam’s claim that he was “very serious about his religion” (so much so that he hadn’t been able to find a sufficiently fundamentalist wife) and that a man with the same name as him was under investigation from the FBI for putting up enthusiastic postings on a Jihadist website about the joys of suicide bombing.
But not before having first blamed those far more likely causes – white racism…
But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old man accused of Thursday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., began having second thoughts about a military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim, he told relatives in Virginia.
And, yes, of course, that old favourite – passive combat stress:
Source blogs.telegraph.co.ukHaving counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan. “He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”
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