The mass murderer Nidal Hasan followed Islam by the book

The best way to understand the timeless reality of Islamic jihad is to look at the connections between, on one side, the jihadist doctrines in the classic Muslim texts, and, on the other side, the actual conduct of jihad warriors over the centuries who have explicitly put those doctrines into practice. The noted Islam critic and editor of The Al Qaeda Reader, Raymond Ibrahim (here are previous mentions of him at VFR), has a very useful two part article, published at the unfortunately named website Pajamas Media, in which he relates the pattern of Nidal Hasan’s behavior to Islamic doctrine.

Ibrahim’s argument can be summarized fairly simply. According to authoritative Muslim sources, which are themselves based on the Koran and Hadiths, such as the writings of the author el-Tabari of the eighth and ninth centuries, a Muslim must not be friends with Christians and Jews, on pain of being seen as an infidel himself and suffering the due horrible punishment. He must have enmity to infidels and loyalty to Muslims. Even if the infidels are kind to him and the Muslims are hurtful to him, a Muslim must never do anything to help infidels against Muslims. However, if circumstances temporarily require a Muslim to deal with infidels, he can pretend to be their friend. This is the doctrine of taqiyya or concealment. But if the practice of taqiyya reaches the point where in order to maintain the false front of friendship with infidels, the Muslim must actually do something that will harm his fellow Muslims, then taqiyya must be dropped and jihad commenced. Furthermore, as Ibrahim shows us from the Islamic teachings, there is such a thing as solo jihad, in which a single Muslim fights against an entire army of infidels and sacrifices his life, becoming a martyr.

Such, says Ibrahim, was the very course Hasan pursued. As a pious Muslim he properly regarded infidels—i.e., other Americans—as his enemies. But once he had become a U.S. Army officer, involving him of necessity in close relations with other Americans, he began to practice taqiyya, pretending to be friends of the infidel Americans by day, while secretly maintaining contacts with various jihadists by night. But when he was assigned to go to Afghanistan, that meant to his mind that he would be fighting against his fellow Muslims. Of course he himself would not be fighting, as he was a doctor. But the prospect of serving in Afghanistan as part of an army fighting against the Taliban and al Qaeda threatened Hasan with the hellfire reserved for infidels. This was why he did everything he could, as noisily as he could, to get the Army to excuse him from going to Afghanistan. It was even the main point of his notorious PowerPoint lecture that a Muslim in the U.S. military must not be required to fight against fellow Muslims. But when he couldn’t get out of the deployment, the time for taqiyya had ended, and the time for jihad—one-man jihad—had arrived.

As Ibrahim indicates, every step of Hasan’s behavior fit that of a devout Muslim following jihad doctrine.

But, according the liberal media, Hasan carried out his attack because he had been “taunted” as a Muslim by fellow Army officers. According to the Human Biodiversity blogger Dennis Mangan, Hasan carried out the attack because, being unable to find a Muslim wife, he was sexually frustrated. And according to the most outre theory seen so far, Hasan carried out the attack because, as a result of treating Iraq veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, he, though never having been in combat himself, had picked up pre traumatic stress disorder, a new syndrome made up on the spot in order to avoid thinking that Islam had anything to do with the massacre at Fort Hood. These and other non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism all stem from the unforgivable refusal of otherwise intelligent people to know anything about the doctrines of Islam, which command Muslims to do certain things.

Ibrahim concludes:

The ultimate lesson? So long as Muslim doctrines are downplayed in the West, so long will warning signs, even concrete intelligence, be ignored, so long will such seemingly inexplicable incidents occur, so long will the media continue grasping for straws and Americans be “completely blindsided,” so long will “Muslim grievance” be the default answer, so long will appeasement and concessions (domestically and internationally) be the only solution, so long will jihadis and Islamists grow emboldened and contemptuous, expecting more. Ad infinitum.

Conversely, if the Fort Hood massacre causes Americans to begin taking Islam’s doctrines more seriously, the thirteen slain, while dying tragically, will not have died in vain.

- end of initial entry -

November 21

LA writes:

Just to document my remark about Dennis Mangan’s theory that Hasan’s mass murder of U.S. soldiers was driven by sexual frustration rather than jihad, here is the relevant exchange at Mangan’s site.

A commenter named J said:

Well, it is known that Arabs are a very high-strung and emotional people. More than a religious crime, I would say it was a passional mass murder, caused by his sexual frustration. Dr Hassan was (is) a healthy 39 y.o., single, with no girlfriend. He may have climaxed while shooting his fellow soldiers. We shall never know.

J. then added:

More than a religion motivated mass murder, I think it is a crime of passion. You have a 39 years old healthy single Arab—a people known for their unstable emotional reactions, sexually starved for who knows how long. What do you expect? Add the vision of 70 virgins expecting him in Paradise, and you have Dr. Hassan running amok.

Does Dennis Mangan express any skepticism about the notion that the self-described jihadist Nidal Hasan’s act of mass murder, the possibility of which he had darkly hinted to the Army for months (remember his warning in his PowerPoint presentation about the “adverse consequences” of requiring U.S. Muslim soldiers to fight against Muslims?), was caused by sexual frustration, indeed, that it was really a “crime of passion” during which Hasan may have sexually climaxed? Nope, Mangan doesn’t question it at all. To the contrary, he agrees with it. Here is his reply to J.:

I also think that there is something to the sexually frustrated loser aspect here. No wife or girlfriend, just like Cho and Sodini and likely many others.

November 22

Kristor writes:

HBD goes Freudian. How long before it goes Marxist?

If everything is nothing but x, then “everything is nothing but x” is nothing but x.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 20, 2009 06:15 AM | Send