Shafia Becomes An Excuse For Anti-Muslim Racism

Of course the horror of the multiple murders of three young girls and their mother by the father, son and second wife ought to be condemned. It ought to be the focus for a public discussion about the plight of women who are too often the focus for familial violence.

But that is not what is happening with this trial. Instead the trial is being used to blame immigrants in general and Muslims in particular for violence against women and children. It's posed as "honour" killings, using a symbology that has already been constructed as distinctly foreign and Islamic.

However, while it is certainly the truth that some murderers of women will use Islam to justify their acts, others will use whatever ideology is at hand - Christianity, male supremacy - or none at all. Violence against women is a social, not an Islamic, problem. By deflecting the blame onto the "Muslim community" not only is it deepening the idea that somehow Muslims are preternaturally more likely to harm and oppress women but also that it is a problem confined to that community. The rest of us can rest safe and feel no need to look more deeply at the root causes of violence.

Yet, what is certain is that Robert Picton, who systematically slaughtered dozens of sex trade workers from the streets of Vancouver was not a Muslim. Nor was Paul Bernardo, who raped and murdered numbers of women.

More mundanely, as the statistics demonstrate, large numbers of women across the country face abuse at the hands of spouses as a matter of course. In 1997-98 there 90,792 admitted to the 413 battered women's shelters across Canada. In 2001 69 men were accused of killing their wife or ex-wife. And there were 183 family related homicides in 2001. While the ethnicity and religion of the victims and culprits is not available in these statistics, it is almost certain that the vast majority of family killings were of white, Christian men killing white, Christian women.

And, yet, there is no call for the "Christian community" to wake up and deal with the issue of Christian violence. Even after we have seen repeatedly the scandal of Catholic priests sexually abusing children there was no outrage about the complacency of the Catholic community. There is, in fact, a double standard rooted in racism and the justification necessary for the ongoing war in Afghanistan and for beating the war drums about Iran and, previously, Iraq.

Instead of blaming Muslims for this heinous crime, the conversation ought to be about eliminating the real source of oppression of women. It ought to be about addressing lack of funding for social services that make women dependent upon men - like lack of daycare or attacks on women's right to abortion. It ought to address the fact that women are still paid less than men, which is a concrete manifestation of the belief that women are of less value than men. The list could go on.

But, of course, that won't happen. The federal, provincial and municipal governments are all on an austerity binge and, inevitably, the people who suffer the most are those who are already vulnerable - women, immigrants, the poor. Then, when the insurmountable pressure of cuts and demonization leads to acts of interpersonal violence or eliminates escape routes for women, the demonization is simply further ramped up. It means that the tragedy of these murders will not end with the deaths of four women - it will be doubled and trebled by ignorance and misdirection.

Shafia trial a wake-up call for Canadian Muslims - The Globe and Mail:

'via Blog this'

David Menzies Shows How Fast Racist Lies Travel The World

Racist code words and lies, Menzies is an excellent
example of "objective journalism."

I was sent an article this morning from August 5, written by a freelance journalist named David Menzies, detailing his "shocking" experience of not only being assaulted by some hijab wearing Muslim women but then, to add insult to injury, the police wouldn't even charge them with assault.

According to Menzies he was paying a little visit to Dundas Square one Saturday and decided to take some pictures of the locale - he lives in Richmond Hill. Suddenly some hijab wearing women - some in "full burqas" rushed up to him insisting that he not take their picture. He told them that he was in a public square in a democracy, he could take pictures of whomever he wanted. That's when she punched him in the face and tried to steal his camera! But then those damn police, made soft from drinking too deeply the ideology of multiculturalism, listened to both sides of the story - and even excoriated him for his picture taking - before refusing to lay charges. Can you believe it?

That's the story, more or less, as it's being carried on news sites around the world - and far-right websites, like "Gates of Vienna" (popular with the guy who killed 70-odd kids in Norway earlier this month). And it's the story that was carried in the Toronto Sun - written by Menzies himself.

Now, call me a conspiracy theorist but I immediately smelled bullshit. There were too many of the typical code words, plus the sneering tone whenever the question of Muslims came into the discussion. So, I decided to look a little deeper into this Menzies dude, about whom I'd never heard previously. And what do you know, sure enough he's a right wing nutter who makes his living writing for every right wing rag in the country - the National Post, the Sun, and a now defunct publication called The Western Standard. The Western Standard - still available online - was started by Ezra Levant, one of the founders of The Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance (I actually debated him on-air once on the Judy Rebick/Clare Hoy show Face-Off). Levant is a vile, far right individual whose most recent claim to fame was to coin the phrase "ethical oil" as the particular spin he would use to promote the deeply unethical Alberta Tar Sands.

The Western Standard was not only a big promoter of "western separation" and "western alienation" - those bugaboos of every right wing blowhard west of the Alberta border. It also made its name as the only English language publication to reproduce the deeply offensive "Muhammad cartoons" originating from Denmark, which insulted the founder of the Muslim religion. Now, you may think that this is an issue of "freedom of speech" - I say that it's incitement and that it would never be tolerated were the shoe on the Christian foot. Imagine, after the scandal about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, if newspapers had printed cartoons of Jesus sodomizing young boys. Do you think that would be a fair response? Do you think that it would ever happen? Unlikely. And the broader point is Menzies association with far-right publications and Islamophobia.

Menzies is also a regular guest on the Michael Coren show on the Crossroads Television System, which is a Christian TV station, based out of Hamilton. Coren, also a columnist in The Western Standard, is renowned for his ultra-conservative views on women, gays & lesbians and, you guessed it, Muslims. Menzies also appears regularly on the John Oakley show - Oakley is another opponent of same sex marriage and uses his radio show as a platform for Rob Ford's lies and rants.

Menzies whose temper has apparently almost gotten him in trouble with the cops more than once is also has a minor obsession with debunking the climate change myth. He made a name for himself by not merely refusing to turn off his lights for Earth Hour but renting Hollywood lights for his front yard. As he describes it, climate change is a communist conspiracy (not that far from the opinion of Stephen Harper, actually):

Menzies, a regular contributor to the John Oakley and Charles Adler shows on AM 640 and on Michael Coren's TV show, relishes sticking it to the global-warming-gurus who he believes have been blowing environmental Armageddon smoke for years.

"All it is, is income and wealth distribution propagated by former Communists and socialists looking for something to do," he said of the movement.

"What's it called this week? Climate change? Next it will be global icing."

All of which is to say that his narrative – and his enthusiasm to spread this story far and wide – is deeply suspect. Just look at the kind of giveaway stuff in the story – complaints about Toronto being too "culturally sensitive", the Muslim women are "hysterical", the men are a "mob", "was I in Toronto or Riyadh", some of them were (shock!) speaking Arabic. And, the kicker: "The fact that we have Islamists living amongst us who despise western values isn't news..." Oh, western values like same sex marriage and the right to abortion, David?

Menzies claims that he just "happened" to snap a photo, he didn't even notice that there were women wearing hijabs nearby. Oh no, those crazy Muslims see a camera – and if you go to Dundas Square on a Saturday there are hundreds of people with cameras – and they go completely bonkers! You see, they don't have cameras in the Middle East. Oh, wait, what about all those pictures and videos coming out of Syria and Egypt, et al to document the human rights abuses of their governments?

Or maybe this renowned Muslim hating dirtbag was snapping photos of these women to demonstrate the decline of our civilization for allowing them to exist and they objected. But Menzies thinks he can do whatever he wants: "This is a democracy and I can take pictures of whomever I please." Actually, no you can't. People have a right to privacy and to not have their picture taken. It seems highly likely that he made some more racist comments, increasing the tension in the situation and the woman made a grab for his camera. Even the cops obviously thought he was a crank with one of them "miffed that I was (legally) taking photos in the first place" and, having spoken to the woman, refused to press charges. The only thing notable about this non-event is that it not only made a major newspaper in Toronto but that it has now gone around the world in seven league boots. So much for the "culturally sensitive" bologna. I would only add that it is particularly odious that Menzies engaged in this kind of Muslim-baiting in the days following the massacre in Norway that was driven by a hatred of Muslims.


Postscript: Unfortunately for the "western values-hating" Muslims our much-vaunted freedom of the press doesn't include providing them with access to a half-page column in the Toronto Sun to give their side of the story.

Norway: Terrible Side-Effect of Islamophobia

The horror, tragedy and seeming madness of the killing spree in Norway are almost impossible to imagine. There is a temptation to focus on the mourning and solidarity with people in Norway and to resist analysis as something cold and foreign to the human dimension of the tragedy. But, of course, Anders Breivik has ensured that any discussion of the events are infused with politics, since that was his motive. But, even more so, the wide reach of mainstream media analysis has also put politics front and centre. And, perhaps more than anything, now is the time to understand why this happened as a prelude to ensuring it never happens anywhere else.

In many ways, the initial response of the media and its associated punditry was proof enough of the origins of the ultimately demented and violent ideology that motivated Breivik. With no evidence other than an M.O. that looked nothing like other types of Islamist terrorism, the media was abuzz with claims that it was likely to be Islamists who were behind the dual attack. Even now that it has become clear that Breivik is a fascist and virulent Islamophobe, the attempt to associate his acts somehow with al Qaeda or "jihadism" continue to permeate significant sections of the coverage. This, of course, was no different than what happened after the Oklahoma bombing when every TV news blowhard and politician was pointing the finger at Muslims, leading to attacks in the streets. When it was discovered that, in fact, it was a white Christian man, there were no threats of pogroms, no Christians fired from their jobs, no deportations or no-fly lists, no commentaries and blog posts about the need for Christians to disassociate themselves from terrorism. He was just a "lone nut."

In the case of Anders Breivik it has been more difficult to call him a lone nut. His wide-ranging political associations with the far right in Europe, from the English Defence League and Stop The Islamification of Europe to the medieval militarism of the "Knights Templar" and various anti-Muslim and fascist blog sites, make it clear that he was part of a community of co-thinkers. Thankfully this has led to a public call to face up to the fact that the growth in anti-immigrant parties and movements in Europe demands a response.

But the trouble is, the far right has gotten encouragement and received support from mainstream political parties. Parties from the social democratic left to the ultra-conservative right have contributed to the sense of a "clash of cultures" and a "crusade" against "backward and violent Islam" with the War on Terror that has specifically targeted Muslim countries and Muslim leaders. Certainly the Taliban and Saddam Hussein had little to recommend them - but they had little to do with 9/11. Saddam Hussein was leader of a secular party - the Ba'athist Party - and had never even flirted with Islamism. The Taliban nominally ruled over Afghanistan, which was a base for al Qaeda but only a few years earlier al Qaeda was a CIA asset in the war against the Soviets. And the Americans didn't seem so troubled by the fact that al Qaeda had a training camp in Afghanistan that it prevented politicians and oil executives from entering negotiations with the Taliban for a pipeline across the south of the country. Besides, there were more and better organized Islamists in Pakistan - hell, they basically ran the country through the ISI, which worked closely with the USA during and after the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding the lack of any internal logic related to Islam, the Muslim world had the misfortune of being concentrated in areas of special strategic interest to the American empire. And not being sufficiently subordinate and useful to that empire, they became the target of attack. The use of Islamophobia to provide an ideological underpinning was an extension of the defeat in Iran, where a secular, American backed dictator - the Shah - was overthrown in 1979 by a coalition that was led by Islamists. If the political leadership had been Zoroastrian, then America would have demonized them, because by definition, anybody who fights America the Good is therefore evil. The fact that America the demonization of Islam was an utterly convenient and hypocritical tool of the American government was made clear by the fact that as they were ramping up the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the wake of the "hostage crisis" in Iran, they were starting to ramp up support, including military aid, to Islamist guerillas in Afghanistan.

The Soviets are now long gone and the Islamists no longer serve much purpose to the Americans, except in a couple of important outputs - notably Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. They are now the enemy and the full force of American propaganda has been levelled against them. By now we're all familiar with this particular narrative - Muslims are backward medievalists, they hate and oppress women, they are violent as represented by the concept of jihad, etc. Of course, none of these qualities has ever bothered America or Europe when it served their purposes - Contra guerillas in Nicaragua raped and tortured women; the motivation for numerous American backed death squads in Latin America was grounded in a particular reading of Christianity that was backwards and obviously cruelly violent. But the imprimatur of the US State Dept, along with the active support of most European capitals and a stereotype promoted through the news, analysis, TV and film entertainment, etc. made sure that this view of Islam was widely disseminated and accepted.

In politics there is always a connection between one action and the next, a continuous chain of causality that usually contains its own profound ironies. Islamophobia and a muscular imperialism throughout the Muslim world is no different. The support for repressive, kleptocratic dictators - both secular and sectarian - and the wars of against non-compliant nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, have driven large numbers of Muslims to Europe's and North America's shores to escape the impact of our policies. But with the demonization and stereotypes already in place - as well as an abiding anger against western imperialism by a significant minority in the region, which a vanishingly tiny minority turned into a justification for terrorism - the stage was set for an attack on immigration and multiculturalism, which couldn't avoid being seen as too permissive of "backward" cultural practices of the sort ascribed to Muslims.

In the first instance, the source of this backlash against immigrants was from mainstream politicians and news media, who whipped up campaigns against Muslims. In some parts of Europe - notably France and Belgium - this has included outright bans on head scarves and the like in order to "protect" vulnerable Muslim women from the prey of repressive Muslim men. Of course, white women aren't protected from becoming prey to predatory plastic surgeons who impose unhealthy and invasive breast augmentation at a rate of close on 300,000 per year in the USA, not to mention the social coercion that makes women feel un-womanly if they don't wear short skirts, diet, wear torture implements known as high heel shoes, and spend thousands of dollars to paint their faces. This has never been about protecting women but about "bringing home" the wars that we are fighting abroad and in using already widely accepted characterizations to redirect the public anger experienced by millions whose lives are getting worse under neo-liberalism and a capitalist economy in crisis, onto easy and vulnerable scapegoats.

Maine Tea Party: condemned by their own words

This backdrop is important to understand because it is simply not true that the arrival of immigrants a priori leads to a right wing immigrant backlash - but that is now the dominant discourse being peddled. The article in the New York Times linked to at the bottom of this post makes precisely this matter-of-fact, common sense claim:

Immigration from Muslim countries to Scandinavia and the rest of Europe has set off a deep political debate across the continent and strengthened a number of right-wing anti-immigrant parties.

Canada, at 5.6 migrants per 1,000 population has had much higher rates of immigration than Norway at 1.7 migrants per 1,000 population. This is not to say that there's no racism in Canada or no Islamophobia - there most certainly is. But immigration is central to our economic growth and is accepted as such by every major political party and major media outlet. There has been no sustained campaign against multiculturalism in most of Canada - though Quebec experienced some controversy about "reasonable accommodation" and Harper tried to make an issue out of full face veils at election booths. Not surprisingly, Canada has no significant far-right presence and there are no fascist parties of which I'm aware.

But in Europe - and America, which has combined Islamophobia with hysteria around illegal Latino immigration - the sustained and aggressive mainstream campaign leads some to draw the full logical and horrifying conclusions: that the nation must be protected from an "invasion" by dangerous outsiders and a war on "indigenous" values. In Norway, it had dramatically tragic results. However, the rot is deep and widespread - much deeper than Breivik. Just take a look at the front page of the Maine Tea Party website, which celebrates Breivik as "Man of the Year, 2011". The Tea Party has taken over a significant portion of the Republican Party. And it is only one component that included the Minutemen Project, vigilantes who "patrol" America's borders - whose politics are reflected in anti-immigrant laws in places like Arizona. The truly horrifying lesson from this is that unless the mainstream bigotry of Islamophobia is challenged, this will not be the last such tragedy. Western imperialism created Islamism, in large measure, by destroying all alternative avenues for political expression in the Middle East and the Muslim world. It has no created fascist violence at home by demonizing all Muslims as Islamists and Islamism as a particularly notorious ideology - ignoring the wide spectrum of beliefs and policies that guide various Islamist parties. As British socialist blogger Richard Seymour wrote in an excellent dissection of this whole phenomenon on his blog:

The Islamophobia that has been energetically disseminated by the belligerents of the 'war on terror', the view seriously entertained by many that Europe's Muslim minority constitutes a threat meriting legal supervision and restriction at the very least, has provided the intellectual and moral basis for the mass murder of Norwegian children. No one who is not prepared to countenance this can have anything morally serious or even creditable to say about this slaughter. And anyone who starts from the idea of blaming Islam is placing themselves in a contemptible affinity with the perpetrator.

Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S. - NYTimes.com

Veil Ban: French Parliament Stuffed With Racists

French fashion: Is this woman liberated

Today the French Parliament passed a bill banning the wearing of face-covering veils in public. Now, if women are caught in public wearing a veil, they will be forced to pay a $190 fine and enroll in a "citizenship course." The justification for this repressive measure is that it is about protecting the dignity of women.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said earlier this year that the full veil "hurts the dignity of women and is not acceptable in French society".

This, of course, is an enormous crock of you-know-what. First of all there are only perhaps 2,000 women in all of France, out of a population of 62 million people, who wear a full-face veil. But also, this is nothing more than cultural supremacism. Does it not hurt the dignity of women to have to wear high heel shoes and other torture devices? How about short skirts and tight clothes or multi-coloured oil-based creams and powders to emphasize their lips, eyes and cheeks and thus their sexuality? Is breast augmentation supportive of the dignity of women as human beings? Collagen injections? The face veil on women is, of course, an expression of the fact that women are oppressed. But so are these other feminine "necessities". The issue is a cultural and a racial one. It is about attacking an identifiable minority.

Life in France is "carried out with a bare face", Michele Alliot-Marie, the justice minister, said last week as she opened the debate in the National Assembly.

Face-covering veils "call into question the idea of integration, which is founded on the acceptance of the values of our society", Alliot-Marie said.

Alliot-Marie and Sarkozy would know, like ever French person, that the inability to integrate into French society is precisely why the immigrant ghettoes that surround major French cities periodically explode in riots and protests. The children and grand-children of immigrants are still not accepted as French and are denied equal participation in French society by French laws, French social policy and French attitudes. If Alliot-Marie and Sarkozy were truly interested in bringing immigrants "into the fold" they wouldn't be forcing women who wear the veil into their homes to avoid being punished. How is it liberating for a woman, supposedly oppressed by her husband, to face the coercion of the French state to do something that is unacceptable to her husband, her community and possibly even to herself.
This has nothing to do with women's dignity and everything to do with pandering to the far right and to sowing divisions at a time of heightened anger over French austerity plans. At the end of June there was a nationwide general strike and over 200 demonstrations, mobilizing some 2 million people, across France against plans to raise the retirement age. Deflecting people's anger onto immigrants has served the French ruling class well in the past - and the Nazis. In the 1980s it led to the dramatic rise of Jean Marie Le Pen's fascist National Front. The FN has been diminished in recent years but it could easily spring back to life with this kind of backlash.
That's why it is so dangerous that the French left has been utterly terrible on the question of the veil and the hijab. The opposition Socialist Party walked out of the vote in parliament, not because it opposes a ban per se, but because it thought that it should only be confined to government buildings. Apparently it is better to merely exclude these women from gaining access to social services. What if they were being abused and wanted to access help? Apparently they would have to disrobe first. But even the French far-left has not been consistent in supporting the right of women to choose what garments they will wear. The New Anti-capitalist Party selected a hijab wearing woman to stand on one of their electoral lists in the most recent election. Not only did this spark a huge outcry in the media, the NPA itself was split over the question, with the fight continuing. The French left must get clear on the question of the veil - it is a question of racism. And, just like in Afghanistan, we must give no quarter to the bombers who would "liberate" women  by invading their country, we must oppose attempts to "liberate" women by forcing them to give up their social customs against their will.

Non-Muslim Swiss Man Builds Minaret

GLAD TO SEE SIGNS OF ANTI-RACIST LIFE IN SWITZERLAND, I must say. This article is about a Swiss man who decided to send a big "fuck you" to the far-right in Switzerland - and the boneheaded voters who went along with the referendum to ban the building of minarets. Converting the chimney on his house into a minaret is the next best thing to tearing down all the damn church towers blotting the European skyline. I'm joking, of course (sort of), but just to make the point that Christianity's presence is felt everywhere in Europe and it has, ahem, a pretty piss poor record on the question of equality (women priests anyone? gay rights?), tolerance and progressive thinking. So Christians who say anything about the character of Islam ought to look in the mirror. Or their own bell towers - probably built by the forced labour of peasants. Anyway, two thumbs up to you, Guillaume Morand.

"It was scandalous that the Swiss voted for the ban. Now we have the support of all the far-right parties across Europe. This is shameful," he said. Mr. Morand put up the minaret on Tuesday not only to protest the decision but also to send a message of peace.

Switzerland Votes For Islamophobia

ISLAMOPHOBIA IS A GROTESQUE BOIL ON THE BODY POLITIC in countries throughout the West. It is used by wing-nuts and psychopaths like Pat Robertson to justify the War On Terror. And it is certainly the subtext even amongst mainstream politicians - as witnessed by the bizarre campaign by the Tories to ban women from wearing the niqab (dress worn by conservative Muslim women that includes a face covering). Given that there are an exceedingly small number of women in Canada who wear the niqab, the hub-bub was nothing more than a racist whip-up by the Conservatives to please their right-wing base. But this sort of right-wing nonsense is ultimately an issue of civil rights.
The insanity of Islamophobia and its dangers has been made clear by a referendum vote on Sunday in Switzerland, which banned the building of any more minarets - the towers outside of mosques traditionally used to call the faithful to prayer. The vote passed by 57 percent after a campaign that was explicitly anti-Muslim and led by the far-right Swiss People's Party. Switzerland has 400,000 Muslims - 6 percent of the population - who are having their civil rights denied to them - there has been no ban on church towers. So much for the nation of religious tolerance.

Of 150 mosques or prayer rooms in Switzerland, only 4 have minarets and only 2 more minarets are planned. None conduct the call to prayer.
Close to 90 percent of Muslims in Switzerland are from Kosovo and Turkey and do not adhere to the codes of dress and conduct associated with conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, said Manon Schick, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International in Switzerland.
Muslim leaders have tried to keep out of the spotlight and to avoid internationalizing the issue, shunning interviews with most news media from Muslim countries, according to Mr. Ibram.
Still, the campaign was accompanied by sporadic shows of hostility. In two separate incidents last week, vandals damaged Geneva’s main mosque by throwing stones and a pot of paint. On another occasion, Mr. Ibram said, a van pulled up outside the mosque early in the morning, loudly blaring a recording of the call to prayers through loudspeakers.

Why Is Obama Stirring Up Racism?

PEOPLE IN AMERICA AND AROUND THE WORLD had a right to expect that the first black president of the United States, a country built upon African slavery and racism, would be an anti-racist president, sensitive to ethnic stereotyping. But it seems as though these days Obama never misses an opportunity to betray the hopes of those who thought he represented "change you can believe in."
At the Fort Hood services on Wednesday, Obama managed to make sure that a connection was made to Islam - though without the courage to actually say the religion's name. In doing so he gave confidence to bigots across America - like Senator Joe Lieberman, who has called for a congressional inquiry into domestic terrorism, because Major Nidal Malik Hasan appeared to be a "self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist." Or perennial right-wing Christian lunatic Pat Robertson from the 700 Club, who said on Monday:

"You're dealing with not a religion. You're dealing with a political system. And I think you should treat it as such and treat it's adherents as such. As we would members of the Communist party and members of some Fascist group."

It would be nice if Robertson were an isolated lunatic but he is a very influential televangelist with his own university - Regent University - and a cable news station, CBN, which is broadcast in 180 countries and 71 languages. With this kind of public offensive against Muslims, Obama ought to be publicly demolishing such racist arguments. He ought to be saying that Hasan, like other US soldiers, cracked as a side-effect of the war. But, instead, he reaffirmed this racist message to 15,000 assembled people at Fort Hood, and to the rest of the world through the media, which carried his speech:

"No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts. No just and loving God looks upon them with favor."

Yet the real cause of people like Hasan hurting themselves and others is no mystery and it's got nothing to do with religion. As Dahr Jamail reports, there have been an average of 10 suicides per month at Fort Hood, 75 in total by July of this year.  Out of a population of 50,000 that's over two per 1,000. The national average amongst men is 17.7 per 100,000, or .177 per 1,000. Fort Hood's suicide rate is thus 100 times the national average. According to a 2008 Rand Study that Jamail quotes:

"Nearly 20% of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all -- report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment."

He also notes that 43,000 soldiers were diagnosed as non-deployable for medical reasons just three months prior to be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. That number is likely to increase as Obama ramps up the war in Afghanistan. Looked at in the light of these easily discovered facts, Hasan is not out of the ordinary at all but is part of a general trend in a military that is fraying because of the burden of trying to carry two wars for nearly a decade.
Obama could have said this. He could have contributed to the healing by saying that Hasan's actions - like those of Sgt. John Russell who shot and killed five US soldiers at a hospital in Iraq - were an alarm bell that the wars are destroying the people who are supposed to fight it. Probably there were more than a few people amongst the 15,000 who saw Obama speak will commit suicide and many more who suffer from PTSD and whose lives are a torment. Obama's strident rhetoric only serves to increase racism towards Muslims and to increase the guilt that soldiers suffering from mental illness will feel, and thus make it less likely that they will seek help until it is too late. But then it's no surprise he didn't do this. Many of those who were in the crowd will soon be sent over to Afghanistan. The president of the United States wouldn't want them thinking that there was a way out.

Obama Plans "Horrific Outburst Of Violence" For Afghans

God "told" George to go to war

THERE MUST BE A STRONGER WORD THAN "HYPOCRITE" to describe the moral depravity of condemning a single killer who shoots down 13 unarmed US military personnel, while planning on sending 34,000 heavily armed military personnel to shoot down Afghans. I'm open to suggestions because that's apparently the plan that's being considered by President Obama, this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
There also ought to be a word for the media that doesn't notice this not-very-subtle contradiction in values and, instead, masturbates over whether Hasan attended religious services at the same mosque as men linked to 9/11 or whether he handed out Korans on the day he went on a rampage. Does anyone perform background checks on the people who go to church with George W. Bush? How about Timothy McVeigh? (I know, putting the two men together is an unfair association - Bush is responsible for far more deaths than McVeigh). Did the two men say their prayers on the mornings in which they killed people? Certainly God "told" George personally that he ought to "end the tyranny in Iraq", "fight terrorists" in Afghanistan, and get the Palestinians their state. Why does no one suggest, as all the media are implying with their obsession about Hasan's religious activities, that Christianity is an especially dangerous religion, the practice of which must be closely observed?
I guess the word we're looking for here is also hypocrite. Perhaps the best we can do is modify it with the word racist, since it's apparent that anyone with a Muslim background comes in for special treatment and assessment that's not applied to the rest of the population.

Statement From Fort Hood Veterans

THIS VERY GOOD STATEMENT about the shooting at Fort Hood is by the Fort Hood chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War is one that should be read and passed around widely. It puts the tragic news in its proper context.


Our community is distraught by the tragic shooting at Fort Hood yesterday. We extend our condolences to the families and friends of the victims.

As upset as we are about this incident, this shooting does not come as a shock. Eight years of senseless wars have taken a huge toll on our troops and their families. It’s time to admit that the wars in southwest Asia are in no one’s best interests. Bring the troops home now!

The Army has also repeatedly demonstrated that it is more interested in making soldiers “deployable” than it is in helping them fully recover from PTSD and other mental health issues. This often leaves soldiers with few options other than to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. The Army routinely deploys soldiers who are clearly suicidal and homicidal. Yesterday was a gruesome reminder of the possible violent consequences of this policy. We hope the Army now takes its duty to take care of soldiers more seriously.

We demand transparency from the Army and other federal agencies involved with this investigation.

Under the Hood Café provides military service members support with referrals to legal, financial, and medical services. It is a space for troops to freely express their views on the wars and the military. It also offers GI rights counseling. Iraq Veterans Against the War calls for the immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq, reparations for the human and structural damages Iraq has suffered, and full benefits for returning military.

Under the Hood Café
Iraq Veterans Against the War – Fort Hood Chapter