As one of the authors who blogs for Psychology Today, I received an email that went out to all of us a few days ago from our editor. If you have anything to say about the shootings at Fort Hood, the shootings perpetrated by Nidal Malik Hasan, please say it. But were the shootings in Fort Hood really Psychology Today material? Were they the insane acts of a man driven over the edge by the vicarious stress of war? By the strain of hearing horror stories from the traumatized veterans of battles in Iraq and Iran?
No. Nidal Malik Hasan's acts were in all probability very, very sane. But the roots of their sanity lie in a belief system that is alien to us. A belief system we have been fighting since at least 1993 when the first attempt on the World Center was made. That attempt was made by sane, rational, idealistic men. Men who believed in a compelling and widespread weltanschauung, a weltanschauung that wants to liberate the world. A consistent philosophy that wants to bring all of humanity justice and happiness. Militant Islam. A belief system that will continue to target you and me. A belief system we have to know if we are to counter it.
Our nation performs its unique role in the world when it maintains its tolerance, when it maintains its ability to draw the best from cultures and peoples all over the planet and to bring them together in a common enterprise. But militant Islam uses that tolerance against us. In the Middle East and Asia, it hides behind civilians, stores its weapons in schools, mosques, and hospitals, and uses what one of the most influential interpreters of Islam in the modern world, the Ayatollah Khomeini, mockingly called "Your concerns, your 'humanitarian' scruples" against us.
And this is more than sane. It is endorsed by militant Islam's value system. The Ayatollah Khomeini was very blunt in his opinion of our scruples. Said he, "Your concerns, your 'humanitarian' scruples, are more childish than reasonable." Why? Because the very ethical concepts on which our society is based, concepts we consider universal, are corruptions based on lies in the eyes of militants.
Today the Ayatollah is considered the George Washington of Iran and the founding father of the Islamic revolutionary movement. His portrait appears 30 feet high on walls all over Tehran and is carried in street demonstrations. And many of the adherents to the Ayatollah's revolution feel that it is a moral obligation to take their revolution worldwide. Even those militants in the Islamic world who spurn the Ayatollah as a Shiite-a heretic--agree with his ideas. Says the Ayatollah, "The idea of turning the other cheek has been wrongly attributed to Jesus (peace be unto him); it is those barbaric imperialists that have attributed it to him. Jesus was a prophet, and no prophet can be so illogical. ...To turn the other cheek...is the logic of the indolent, the logic of those who do not know God and who have not studied the Qu'ran." What, then, is the moral thing for just men to do? Again, over to the Ayatollah, "the leaders of our religion were all soldiers, commanders, and warriors. They put on military dress and went into battle in the wars that are described for us in our history; they killed, and they were killed. The Commander of the Faithful himself [Mohammed] (upon whom be peace) would place a helmet on his blessed head, don his coat of chain mail, and gird on a sword." Why? Why this call to war and to the kind of shootings Nidal Malik Hasan carried out at Fort Hood?
For the sake of idealism. For the same kind of lofty motive that drives us all too often to use war and violence. The same kind of ideal for which even our anti-war, our humanitarian, and our human rights movements struggle. To save the world. Said Osama bin Laden's spiritual inspirer, Sayyid Qutb, "Western civilization has nothing else to give humanity....The dominance of Western man has reached its end. The time has come for Islam to take the lead." Not just for the sake of power and greed-though those motives are preached as holy in the Qu'ran. But for the very soul of mankind. As Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, Imam of the Al-Haraam mosque in Mecca, tells worshipers: "Western civilization's credibility as the one capable of leading the world to happiness and man to stability - is shaken... Only one nation is capable of resuscitating global civilization, and that is the nation [of Islam]...While the false cultures sink in the swamp... The Islamic message... is to save the human race."
If you believed in this point of view, you too might do what Nidal Malik Hasan did. You, too, might follow the command of your holy book, the Qu'ran and "Slay the pagans wherever ye find them and seize them beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)." You too might become what American born militant cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, one of Nidal Malik Hasan's friends, called a "hero." And you, too, would be very, very sane.
______
The author: In addition to his books--The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century--Howard Bloom has appeared four times on Iran’s English language global news service Press-TV and has lectured on the 1,387 year history of militant Islam for the New York Military Affairs Symposium.
