Making sense of a senseless mass murder (I)

When I got home, I turned on the TV and realized that the mass murder my friend casually mentioned in the office was a bigger, more complicated story than I’d thought. It wasn’t the habitual, run-of-the-mill gun violence by spoilt, tantrum-throwing, and psychologically disturbed American kids or other deranged adults that I have grown used […]

When I got home, I turned on the TV and realized that the mass murder my friend casually mentioned in the office was a bigger, more complicated story than I’d thought. It wasn’t the habitual, run-of-the-mill gun violence by spoilt, tantrum-throwing, and psychologically disturbed American kids or other deranged adults that I have grown used to here. The suspect was some guy named Major Nidal Malik Hasan whom the news media at first erroneously reported to have been killed by an uncommonly plucky police woman identified as Sgt. Kim Munley. When I heard the name of the suspect, I knew this would be a volatile story. An Arab Muslim involved in the mass murder of 12 white Americans in a post-September 11 era?

In America, the only thing that outsells race is sex. Rather curiously, however, all the major TV networks—Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS—did not associate Major Hasan with a Middle Eastern heritage at first. They all thought—and actually said—that he was a convert to Islam. Even when Fox News interviewed the suspect’s cousin whose last name is also Hasan, the implausibility of the theory that he was a Muslim convert hadn’t dawned on newsmen. Is it conceivable that an entire extended family would convert to Islam and change their last name to the same Muslim name?

But I guess the question to ask is: why wasn’t the man suspected to be of Arab descent? Was it because his picture appears to conform to most of the stereotypic prototypes of a “white man”? (Although the U.S. Census Bureau now officially classifies people from the Middle East and North Africa as “white,” Arabs are routinely racially profiled and “othered” because most of them, perhaps because of the recessive black African genes in them, are usually noticeably darker than the average white American).

The suspect’s physical appearance, judging from the mug shots released to the media, defies the formulaic mental images of an Arab. The American media probably thought he was too pale to be an Arab. Well, the suspect is of Palestinian descent by way of Syria, although he was born and brought in the southern U.S. state of Virginia.

 Or was he thought to be a Muslim convert because there have been at least two other well-publicized cases of American Muslim converts who engaged in gun violence against the U.S. military? In 2003, an African-American Muslim convert, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar (born Mark Fidel Kools), was sentenced to death for killing two of his comrades in Kuwait just before the US-led invasion of Iraq of 2003. And in June this year, a 24-year-old African American Muslim convert identified as Abdul-Hakeen Mujahid Muhammad (originally known as Carlos Bledsoe) also gunned down two soldiers at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Although I must say that Americans in general (especially the top military hierarchy, liberal Americans and the media) have been remarkably and admirably restrained and have resisted the urge to tar all Muslims in the U.S. Army as closet America-hating terrorists, it can’t be denied that American soldiers who are Muslims—and indeed all Muslims in America—will now have to contend with the burden of what psychologists call courtesy stigma, that is, the vicarious stigmatization that guiltless, unaffected people suffer because of their relationship with a person who bears a stigma.

Of course, it is not only American Muslim soldiers who have a history of violently turning against their comrades. In May this year, for instance, a white male Christian American soldier gunned down five of his comrades at Camp Liberty, a sprawling U.S. base on the western edge of Baghdad. As you would expect, no dark, sinister motive was invoked to account for his irrational violence. And no person or group of people has had to suffer a collective courtesy stigma as a result of this.

We should be honest enough, though, to accept the fact that it is perfectly human, even if it’s not entirely morally defensible, for people to deploy different standards to judge their kind and people who look different from them, or for people to be more tolerant of the infractions and foibles of their kith and kin than they are of people who are different from them. That is why although we may insult and even beat up our little brother, our child, or other loved ones, we would kill a stranger who tries to do the same.

 It is this sentiment that explains why the same American news media that had thought Major Hasan was a white American Muslim convert suddenly wanted to know if he has an “accent” after they found out that he is of Palestinian ancestry.