Fort Hood and the Prejudice of Speculation

Even in the United States, land of diversity and individualism, there's still nothing like race and ancestry to imprison you in other people's dumbest assumptions and cruelest distortions.

An American -- American-born, American-bred, American-educated -- is suspected of having committed the mass killing that resulted in the death of 13 people at Fort Hood on Nov. 5. The killer joins the long list of other Americans who have committed mass killings, the second-worst of them in 1991 in the small central Texas city of Killeen, the after-hour shadow of Fort Hood. But the suspect this time has an Arabic-sounding name. Although it shouldn't, it changes everything. A mass murder, bad enough in itself, becomes cause for mass speculation studded with prejudice.

Arabs and Muslims in this country, already condemned to be each other's unwilling synonyms in too many Americans' eyes, are once again on the defensive, having to prove loyalty and love of country even though the only people who should be on the defensive are war-loving Americans who think they can offshore violence and national arrogance ("we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here," in the supremely insulting words of George W. Bush) without ever paying the consequences at home.

It's never so convenient.

Continue reading "The Prejudice of Speculation in the Fort Hood Killings."

See Also:

• The Keffieh and the Arab Heartland
• Satire or Slander: The New Yorker's Obama Mujahideens
• Barack Hussein Obama and Other Arab Stereotypes
• When John Updike Took on Islamist Terrorism
• Don't Miss Link TV's "Who Speaks for Islam"