American law defines terrorism in short..."acts appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping???." We don't know the facts behind Nadal's motives. Terror is a enormously divisive and emotional word. In this vein, would William Roederer, the murderer of Doctor George Tiller be a terrorist. Are the assaults and batteries against women seeking admission to abortion clinics terror? It appears so. Apparently we have Christian terrorists in our midst. How shall we approach their years and years of violence; turn a blind eye?
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Lisa Miller
False Dichotomies
The question about Nidal Hasan isn't whether he's a mental-health victim or a terrorist. He has shades of both, so let's not reduce him to a caricature.
Nov 11, 2009
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We are giving ourselves shallow and untenable choices. Either Islam is a religion that condones violence. Or Islam is a religion of peace. (Click here to follow Lisa Miller).
Either Maj. Nidal Hasan, who opened fire at the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas, last week, killing 12 people, is a victim of extreme posttraumatic stress disorder. Or he is a terrorist, operating under orders from a Yemeni cleric.
Either Americans' reaction to the shootings at Fort Hood are a reversion to the early days after 9/11, when every brown-skinned man in a skullcap was a terrorist suspect. (Earlier this week the director of issues analysis for the conservative American Family Association called for a ban on all Muslims in the U.S. military.) Or Americans are so blindly committed to a politically correct assessment of Islam that, in the word of New York Times columnist David Brooks, "public commentators" absolved Hasan of responsibility, assuming "the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts." (Article continued below...)
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Why do we insist on framing religious issues dualistically, when anyone with a shred of experience of religion knows religion doesn't work that way? In our personal lives, we know how malleable creeds are. We know Jews who follow the laws of kashrut—except on the occasions when they order a cheeseburger for dinner. We know evangelical Christians who believe strongly in the rightness of evolution and Roman Catholics who believe in a woman's right to choose. But we can also point to passages in Scripture that command us to do things we would never dream of doing. In America, we don't stone adulterers. We no longer buy and sell human beings (although students of history will recall that slavery's supporters often used biblical justification for their way of life). Most of us make our peace with these contradictions, most of the time—the contradictions between scriptural mandates and practice, and between the scriptural age and modernity. We don't ask more from religion than religion can give.
Yet when under threat, or when we imagine ourselves to be under threat (for it is unclear what kind of lingering threat Major Hasan's actions realistically pose), we want religion to be definitive. Despite our intimacy with the heterogeneous nature of religious belief, we allow ourselves to be seduced by cartoon characterizations in public: thus, all Mormons hate gays; all Buddhists love peace; all evangelicals believe the earth is merely 6,000 years old. If we have learned anything in this post–9/11 era, it's that there is no definitive religious interpretation. There are only narrow- and broad-minded interpreters.
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