Shooting at Fort Hood

On this terrible day of mourning, Facing History and Ourselves is deeply saddened by the violence at the Fort Hood, Texas military post that left 13 dead and 30 wounded. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood, allegedly opened fire yesterday afternoon at the Soldier Readiness Center, where troops get last-minute checkups before they are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. In the aftermath of this violence, there is concern about backlash in the Muslim community. NPR reports that Hasan, a Muslim, was disciplined early on in his postgraduate work “for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues.” ABC News writes that Hasan allegedly posted a comment on the internet this past May that “compared suicide bombers to GI’s who save their colleagues by throwing themselves on a grenade.” Already, many Muslim and Arab-American groups have made statements condemning the attack. The Association of Patriotic Arab Americans in Military said “ ‘the actions of Hasan are those of a deranged gunman, and are in no way representative of the wider Arab American or American Muslim community,’ ” the Detroit Free Press writes, and Hasan’s family is quoted in an article by the Associated Press saying that “ ‘the actions of their cousin are despicable and deplorable.’ ” As stated in today’s NPR Morning Edition, several Muslim organizations “said they had already received hate emails, and a death threat had been sent to a mosque in Irving, Texas.”