Nidal Malik Hasan Gave Signals Before His Rampage

From the New York Times, "Fort Hood Gunman Gave Signals Before His Rampage":

It was still dark on Thursday when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan left his aging apartment complex to attend 6 a.m. prayers at the brick mosque near Fort Hood. Afterward, he said goodbye to his friends there and asked forgiveness from one man for any past offenses.

“I’m going traveling,” he told a fellow worshiper, giving him a hug. “I won’t be here tomorrow.”

Six hours later, Major Hasan walked into a processing center at Fort Hood where soldiers get medical attention before being sent overseas. At first, he sat quietly at an empty table, said two congressmen briefed on the investigation.

Then, witnesses say, he bowed his head for several seconds, as if praying, stood up and drew a high-powered pistol. “Allahu akbar,” he said — “God is great.” And he opened fire. Within minutes he had killed 13 people.

But relatives and acquaintances say tensions that led to the rampage had been building for a long time. Investigators say Major Hasan bought the gun used in the massacre last summer, days after arriving at Fort Hood.

In recent years, he had grown more and more vocal about his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tortured over reconciling his military duties with his religion. He tried to get out of the Army, relatives said, and apparently believed it to be impossible, though experts say he was probably given inadequate advice.

At times, he complained, too, about harassment, once describing how someone had put a diaper in his car, saying, “That’s your headdress.” In another case cited by relatives, someone had drawn a camel on his car and written under it, “Camel jockey, get out!”

Major Hasan’s behavior in the months and weeks leading up to the shooting bespeaks a troubled man full of contradictions. He lived frugally in a run-down apartment, yet made a good salary and spent more than $1,100 on the pistol the authorities said he used in the shootings.

He was described as gentle and kindly by many neighbors, quick with a smile or a hello, yet he complained bitterly to people at his mosque about the oppression of Muslims in the Army. He had few friends, and even the men he interacted with at the mosque saw him as a strange figure whom they never fully accepted into their circle.

“He was obviously upset,” said Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old who attended the mosque and ate frequently with Major Hasan at the Golden Corral restaurant. “He didn’t want to go to Afghanistan.”

Read the whole thing.

This is one of those "analytical" pieces that attempts a master synthesis of the various facts and interpretations now available. And at every turn, the piece plays up Hasan's assimilationist, all-American bona fides, and downplays -- even denies, pleading that events are still under "investigation" -- the fanatical extremism that Hasan eagerly adopted as part of his strict interpretation of Islam.

As I reported just tonight, according to London's Telegraph, Malik Hasan preached exterminationism of infidels even at professional events:

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America's Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

He also told colleagues at America's top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.

Malik Hasan may very well have been a fine and gentle man. But he was a ruthless killer who screamed "God is great" before riddling his targets with automatic fire. For the New York Times, there's an agenda -- an agenda of political correctness that bends over backwards not to alienate the Muslim community and the apologist for fanatical Islamism. Of course, if this had been an evangelical Christian opening fire at a conference of imams or murdering another abortion doctor, there'd be no talk of not "rushing to conclusions." Christians as a body would have been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion, found "consumed be hatred" and "intolerant of diversity." That's the double standard that not only demeans the goodness in the hearts of all Americans, but puts this country at an even greater risk of destruction.

RELATED: Robert Stacy McCain, "Paralysis by Analysis."