Here is National Review’s Rich Lowry on the constant chatter in the media about post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of the Ft. Hood massacre:
The obsession with PTSD serves two purposes. First, it fits the media’s favorite narrative of soldiers as victims. Here was poor Hasan, brought low like so many others by the unbearable burden of Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that
PTSD usually results in sleeplessness, flashbacks, and — in the extreme — suicide. Hasan is the first victim of PTSD known to jump on a table and allegedly yell “Allahu Akbar” while slaughtering his fellow troops.
Actually, I sort of share Lowry’s annoyance on the PTSD front. It’s belaboring the obvious to say that of course PTSD is a serious problem, one that the military should (and, I think, does) take seriously. But intentionally or not, hauling it out after every meltdown by a service member serves largely to tar them all in the public mind as unstable misfits who could blow up at any second. That’s both unfair and lazy.
But Lowry then goes on to insist that we should obsess over the fact that Nidal Malik Hasan was a Muslim who was apparently motivated by religious fervor. His colleague Andy McCarthy puts it even more bluntly, claiming that the same beliefs that animated Hasan are widely accepted by Muslims in the United States:
The rote government response is to point out, mulishly, that there are many Muslims honorably serving in the U.S. armed forces. This is absolutely true but utterly beside the point….The honorable service of many Muslims does not alter the reality that there is enormous pressure on Muslim soldiers, from their religious authorities, to sabotage American military operations. Hasan’s massacre of his fellow soldiers is the worst incident we’ve seen, but it’s hardly an isolated incident.
I wonder if they even see the contradiction here? When it comes to PTSD, every soldier is an individual and it’s insulting to see it lying in wait everywhere. But when it comes to extremist beliefs, well, Muslims are all under extreme pressure and we’d be fools not to see it lying in wait everywhere.
I prefer door #1: soldiers aren’t all time bombs waiting to go off, and Muslims aren’t all Manchurian candidates waiting to turn on their fellow Americans. Just because they’re different problems doesn’t mean we can’t address them both with equal doses of common sense.
