Nidal Karen Benmoyal – Click Here for Microsoft Word Form.

The thirteen lives claimed by “an army shrink turned Jihadi,” did not deserve to bear injustice twice. First, when they were targeted, shot, and murdered by Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood in 2009, and again in 2013, when their own government classified their untimely deaths as “workplace violence.” A reason for this herd mentality is due to a common disposition Americans have been fooled into believing. There are forces steadily pressuring millions of Americans into thinking that they must belong to the status quo, or else. This mindset is reinforced by privileges that the group bestows. However, evidence suggests that the following major outlets are heavily responsible for influencing millions of naive Americans into abiding by these unwritten laws of society. These include the social pressure to belong, by most popular media sources, as well as the fear of penalization that is automatically instilled into individuals across the nation, by the nation-state actors that are currently in power.   There are security and power in numbers, in any numbers. The daunting fact that a liberal democracy is basing their definition of how dangerous terrorism really is, on the amount of low statistics recorded on the number of innocent deaths; this is concerning to say the least. The purpose of this essay is to argue and defend the reasons that Nidal Hasan should indefinitely be held accountable for his terroristic crimes against humanity.

In order to explain and prove the causes and reasons of why justice and reason are on the side of those whom Hasan victimized, we must first exploit the hidden agenda of the liberal government currently in power. We must prove their intentions by lifting the veils that continue to protect them, in order to exploit the true categorizing factors and meanings of what terrorism really is. Moreover, since October 2001 there has been a trend in the “mainstream” news media, whom continue to reap benefits by assisting the wielders of power, in order to cover up acts of terrorism, which has simultaneously led to the to the rise of homegrown Jihadism. Reclassifying these acts of terror as “isolated incidents” is unacceptable and unjust. Some examples of these claims will be brought to light throughout this paper, with the intention of bringing justice to the 13 killed and 32 wounded at Fort Hood. It is not difficult to connect the dots when dots are so plentiful, and when the evidence is so abundant.

One could argue that the root cause of all the confusion and misconception surrounding this specific court case ruling, can be linked to, and therefore justified, to the modern definition of terrorism, and to the standards that qualify someone as a terrorist. The causes of domestic and international terrorism, can be studied and proven by use of hindsight. In order to better understand how and why the attacks of September 11, 2001 initially began, one must define what sort of crisis terrorism realistically presents for itself.  This argumentative analysis offers an unprecedented perspective on terrorism in U.S. history, presenting historical events and movements when Americans were threatened within their own borders, due to multiple societal threats that coincidentally stemmed from the “modernized version of American morality.”

The cultural shift of western values has developed into an unreality, mostly due to lack of experience or gullibility, many remain convinced that societal rules of 2016 are the “moral” change that America needs. They blatantly make assumptions, assumptions that Elizabeth Nocas points out in her novel, Terror and Counterterrorism. In other words, one must be wary of the details you may receive from the deceivers in congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.

According to Nocas, “the critical difference between someone who commits murder or battery versus someone who commits an act of terrorism is the intention of the perpetrator and desired result” (7). But each time an attack seems to happen, the leaders of our nation, specifically, the Obama Administration, and other international govt. institutions, such as the U.N., seem to have made great efforts to downplay the terrorism angle.

Before the ruling of Nidal Hasan had been over turned, another injustice had coincidentally resulted from its previous unjust ruling. The reclassification of victims and their families had not yet received the same recognition, medical, or financial benefits as those wounded or killed in war. Not only did the families have to mourn the wrongful losses of their loved ones, they also had to suffer in agony at the thought of a terroristic killer walking free, they were not able to collect any benefits that a soldier’s family would normally have the rights to.

Continuing on with regards to Fort Hood, statistics show that lawmakers estimate there have been thirty-three plotted attacks against the U.S. military since Sept. 11, 2001, and seventy percent of those threats have been since mid-2009.  Major Nidal Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, was allegedly inspired by radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in late September. The two men exchanged somewhere around twenty emails, according to U.S. officials, and Awlaki declared Hasan a hero. For those who don’t remember the bloody episode, Major Nidal Hasan opened fire on 45 people total, one of the murdered victims was pregnant.  When committing this disturbing act, Hasan reportedly screamed, “Allahu Akbar,” the English translation meaning, “G-d is great.” According to court files, he also loudly declared that he was defending the Taliban. Yet, despite his proud announcement, the military decided to classify this Al Qaeda-inspired attack as a petty crime of “workplace violence.” This meant that Fort Hood victims could not receive their Purple Hearts.

To top it all off, on August 20, 2010, the U.S. government began recalling the Fort Hood shooting as an act of “workplace violence,” removing the Islamic terrorism angle completely. There is such abundant evidence to disprove the recurring government claim that “Islam is a religion of peace.” (We are getting to that). Although these brave victims were finally recognized after a retrial in 2015, it was five years too late.

One could counterclaim my argument by the issuing concerns of the “moral dilemma.” By making a claim that justifies the thinking that just because our morals differ from those of Islamic radicals, does not mean that our morals are better or superior enough to be able to overwhelm an entire culture. One could go on to contest that, “an entire culture is so fed up that they have to rebel. They hate us so much for rubbing our culture in their faces, they have every right to bomb us and send us threats of terror whenever they please, because they value death more than we cherish life.

My rebuttals to this claim are simple. First of all, so what if people disagree about values? People also disagree about facts. Bin Laden’s 4,000-word Letter to America, which one can easily access via simple google search, proves this sort of thinking to be delusional. Nidal Hasan is no exception. I will get to the reasoning behind that in just a moment. The radical Muslims are against modernity and science and democracy. The radical Muslims are upset because of colonialism and the Crusades? How much sense does that make? The answers to common assumptions can be easily disproved, when looking at Bin Laden’s legitimate critiques. Why is it that his own personal aspects were so often over looked and ignored? He was a majorly influential man in the Arab world. But it seems that his outlook continues to be ignored, by AMERICANS, even after his passing.

Another rebuttal for the counterclaims made could pull into question, the accuracy of the popular opinion. How exactly do we know that these radicals are protesting traditional western values? I could make the claim that it does not seem likely for a terrorist to discriminate only against those that hold old conservative values. In fact, I could suggest that the claims made by Islamic Jihad, especially in the past eight years, could very well be directed at the MODERNIZED version of morality in the west. In fact, one should consider the last time they witnessed actual proof that the morals this group of people despise so much, are actually aimed towards traditional conservatism. Just like the myth of “the big switch,” you know, that one time, that both parties just happened to switch on a limb? While this topic is a discussion for a whole other time, the point is this: The fact that all Muslim radicals hate ONLY conservative, Americanized culture, is also a flat out lie. Another deception that has been molded into the minds of even the most skeptical conservatives. However, we can debunk this theory by taking a glance at the Qur’an. One can immediately find an irrational excerpt on the goal of Jihad radical extremists, such as the self-proclaimed murderer’s motives, (Hasan), as well as those of Bin Laden. In Qur’an 9:5, a similar description to Osama Bin Laden’s letter to America after 9/11. “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.” As Elizabeth Nocas writes in her novel, Terrorism and Counterterrorism, she points out the four basic assumptions that drive terrorism, at its core. It is worth noting that at least half of those four assumptions can be proven correct, through the evidence provided throughout this writing.

In retrospect, one can develop a pretty strong theoretical argument from the data collected on this assignment. The great intellectual challenge facing less than half Americans today, is to make the case for morality at a time when many in the West have ceased to believe in an external moral order. The decline of belief in such an order is the most important political development of the past two centuries. Indeed, I contest that this decline has created a “crisis of the West.” Therefore, one could argue that the crisis of this so-called, “War on Terrorism,” is essentially an ‘intellectual crisis.’ In other words, this war, is a crisis of understanding, and in order to construct a reasonable counter strategy to fight back against our adversaries, one must fully grasp the notions of what qualifies an attack as terroristic, as well as comprehend the motives and cultural objectives that makes someone like Nidal Hasan, guilty of committing acts of terrorism. Today, with the perspective of hindsight, we can follow every detail of terrorists’ every movement, leading up to the catastrophic events of 9/11.

Additionally, thanks to a detailed government investigation that concluded The 9/11 Commission Report, we know a great deal about what happened and can even pin point the exact reasons of how and why it happened. The gist of the report states that the original plan, which was proposed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, initially devised the hijacking of  a total of ten planes to be crashed into targets set all over the country. Osama Bin Laden carried out the final plan on September 11, 2001. We now know that some targets scheduled to hit places such as the White House and the Capital, but were intercepted before they were able to reach their final destinations. I contest that the reason American’s “war on terror” is still compromised today, is because both the motives and the identities of who our enemies actually are, have remained a controversial, unclear topic in debate.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s continue searching for evidence in the actual letter that Osama Bin Laden wrote to America after 9/11 in 2002. Looking at the letter, there is some indictment against America’s foreign policy. But, read all 4,000 words, you will soon discover that three quarters of the letter mentions his hatred for gambling, adultery, fornication, prostitution, abortion, undermining the family, homosexuals, and especially, Atheism. When you look at the world on a global scale, you realize that America is the front runner of the Atheist movement. We are the head of the snake for all kinds of “modern” values and reasons, that just don’t seem to match up with those of traditional Muslims anymore. The discussion and evidence to support this argument can go on for days, but here is just one excerpt from Bin Laden’s letter, that can better explain the situation at hand.  Centered in the section on foreign policy, Bin Laden states the following in his Letter to America, “The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only; as for the rest of the world, you impose upon them your monstrous, destructive policies and Governments, which you call the ‘American friends’. Yet you prevent them from establishing democracies” (3).  Even if the claim that Islamists have the right to practice their own morals to harm others was justified, even when it means the shooting to death of true freedom fighters serving this country, who’s to say that these proud Muslim traditionalists have it out for only conservative Americans?  It would be farfetched to assume that Bin Laden cherry picked his victims, and neither did Nidal Hasan.

In fact, another argument that could be directed at today’s hypocrisy, is that the traditional western values some still hold, are quite similar to those of traditional Muslims. Doesn’t it make a little more sense, (especially since they proudly chant these sorts of things), that they are realistically chasing after those who believe in secularism and feminism and homosexual rights? The irony in this is astonishing.

The justice system has not been just for quite some time, and this is most probably due to the plea bargaining system. I emphasize that I am not contesting any of the rights of classical liberalism. I am contesting the forces that keep this country so divided that the justice system can no longer do its job. Moreover, the primary goal this paper was to defend the claim that Nidal Hasan is a terrorist, with identical motives that are potentially dangerous to a society that continues to make excuses and technicalities for murderers, rapists, and more.

While attempting to describe the roles that the national media, American newspapers, all social media outlets, NGO’s (international and domestic), our college professors, and Barack Obama and administration, have had in the lives of the people, has made apparent, the presence of a “moral shift,” in our culture. American society, has in turn, engulfed an immoral outlook on America, by Americans and the rest of the world. Perhaps 28-year-old Lincoln got it right, when he stated the following quote, “From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” Although it seems we’ve got so many enemies to fight on the outside, we must start with the ones on the inside.

Furthermore, my main point is as follows:  The U.S. government and President Obama are constantly misguiding the American people, through American power channels such as the national news, the media, and the government-run education system. The statistical, historical, and factual evidence are becoming harder and harder to access because of the amount of control the liberal democracy is capable of in today’s America.

America is now engaged in a two-headed war. It is both a military fight against the radical Muslims abroad, and a political battle against the radicalism at home. These two forces have formed a strange kind of alliance, they have seemingly grown into the vicious and immoral humans. At this point, there should not be any doubt that the mistrials in which a terrorist was convicted of “workplace violence,” contain a grain of legitimacy. Although the battle against terrorism is far from over, the battle against Hasan is seemingly over. There are greater forces still at work we must not forget about. We have to recognize this concept as an inevitable truth, and be prepared to take them on simultaneously. There is no way to restore the culture of the west without winning the war on terror. Contrarily, the only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus, from the research conducted on the Fort Hood shooting, we have arrived at a rather inconvenient truth. In order to defeat the Islamic radical terrorists abroad, we must first defeat the enemy amongst us; the enemy at home.

 

References

Bin Laden, Osama. “Full Text: Bin Laden’s ‘letter to America'” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 24 Nov. 2002. Web. 10 June 2016.

 

K̲h̲ān̲, Vaḥīduddīn, and Farīdah K̲h̲ānam. “9.5.” The Quran. New Delhi: Goodword, 2009. N. pag. Print.

Nacos, Brigitte Lebens. Terrorism and Counterterrorism. 5th ed. Boston: Pearson Longman, 2012. Print.

“The US 9/11 Commission on Border Control.” Population and Development Review 30.3 (2004): 569-74. Web.