The Case of the Fort Hood Massacre
Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in the Fort Hood massacre on Nov. 5, 2009, revived the question: Was the attack an act of terrorism ("the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11," in the reliably spurious words of radio hatemonger Sean Hannity), or was it a characteristically American mass murder? The question wouldn't be asked if Hasan, who is a native American citizen, didn't have an Arab-sounding name.
Clue-concocting and Yemeni-cleric ties aside, it is being asked only because Hasan revives the myth of a "war on terror," so useful to neo-con warmongers nostalgic for the siege mentality of the Bush years.
The nine men and four women killed in the attack were all soldiers. They were unarmed, which blurs the line somewhat-but they were professional soldiers going about their duties, and were killed in the line of duty. Unlike, say, Timother McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber and a terrorist by any definition, the Fort Hood murderer did not target civilians. If it was Hasan, it was a soldier attacking soldiers. He brought home the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fallacies and Contrivances of "Terrorism
"But 'terrorism' no longer means terrorism," to quote Robert Fisk, the longest-serving western journalist in the Middle East. "It is not a definition. It is a political contrivance. 'Terrorists' are those who use violence against the side that is using the word." Until we get past the contrivance, using the word "terrorism" is itself an act of belligerence. Its false distinctions conceal our own terrorism. It absolves its perpetrators. And it makes us complicit in the duplicity, if not the terrorism, for standing united behind the contrivance.
A different version of this essay originally appeared in the Daytona Beach, Fla., News-Journal.