Marc A. Thiessen:
As Americans try to make sense of the tragic shooting in Aurora, Colo., it is natural to reflect on other similar incidents that have scarred our collective memory. And in recent days, this massacre has been compared to shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, the Holocaust Memorial and Fort Hood.
The problem? One of these incidents is not like the others. The Aurora shooting was a senseless act of violence; Fort Hood was a terrorist attack.
The Post quoted a forensic psychiatrist who declared that the shooters in all these cases had a “common motive.” No, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan’s motive was different from that of James Holmes or Seung-Hui Cho. Hasan’s was the same motive that led 19 evil men to fly airplanes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001: He wanted to wage jihad against the United States.
One day before the Aurora shootings, former FBI and CIA director William Webster released a 173-page report on the tragic failure to prevent the Fort Hood attack. It included declassified details of e-mail messages between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was killed last year in a U.S. drone strike. In one e-mail, Hasan asks Awlaki whether he considered Muslims who join the U.S. armed forces and “kill other us soldiers in the name of Islam … with the goal of helping Muslims/Islam (Lets just assume this for now) fighting Jihad and if they did die would you consider them shaheeds” (martyrs).
In another e-mail, Hasan asks Awlaki about “the issue of ‘collateral damage’ where a decision is made to allow the killing of innocents for a valuable target.” The FBI intercepted these and other troubling e-mails but concluded that they posed no serious danger and that an investigation was not necessary.
On Nov. 5, 2009, Hasan entered the Fort Hood deployment center, jumped on a desk and yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he shot and killed 13 people and wounded 43 others. Soon after the Fort Hood attack, Awlaki stated that while he neither ordered nor pressured Hasan to harm Americans, “I blessed the act because it was against a military target. And the soldiers who were killed were not normal soldiers, but those who were trained and prepared to go to Afghanistan and Iraq.”
I have to disagree with the columnists assertion. IMO they are both terrorist acts. The criminal actions of a massacre creates terror in society, (Look at the reaction this evil event has caused,) and it should not be lessened simply because it wasn’t ‘for political reasons’.
While ideology usually is often used in reference to political beliefs, that is not the only definition. Ideology at it’s base is the personal belief of the individual, which can include religious beliefs, or a personal set of ethical beliefs and behavior (or in the sociopaths, immoral and/or unethical behavior) Evil actions done by a criminally inclined psychopath are performed because of their miscreant ideology desire to create fear, mayhem and to kill. Both killers used mass murder to fulfill their evil narcissistic goal.
@Ditto:
I agree. Moreover both acts are nihilistic and there is a Nietzschean aspect to the behavior of both accused murders.
There is no separation of mosque and state in Islam. The political and sacred are one. Islam is a religion of total submission to sacred authority and that sacred authority is political. Islam is a political ideology of totalitarian global supremacism..
BTW: they running the annual Ramadan tally over at Religion of Peace dot com
Ramadan Bombathon
2012 Scorecard Day 4
In the name of …………………..In the name of ……………. By “AntiMuslim”
The Religion …………………. All other …………………… Right-Wingers
of Peace……………………….. Religions
.
Terror Attacks
39…………………………………………0………………………………………….0
Dead Bodies
210…………………………………….. 0………………………………………….0