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Jamal Baadani was driving home from work outside Washington on November 5 when a friend called to tell him a gunman had shot up the Army base at Ft. Hood, Tex. It didn’t take long for Baadani to learn that the suspect, Nidal Malik Hasan, was an Arab-American, a Muslim, and a member of the U.S. military. In other words, nothing like him and everything like him, all at once.

“I was just praying, man,” recalled Baadani, 45, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve. “That’s just been my worst nightmare.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

But Baadani and some of his Arab and Muslim friends in uniform consider it, in President Obama’s occasional phrase, a teachable moment. They are muting their frustration at having to demonstrate their patriotism in public, preferring to answer uncomfortable questions in order to promote cross-cultural unity, something they consider an opportunity that comes with the uniform they wear. After all, Colin Powell cited a New Yorker photo essay of the crescent-engraved headstones of American Muslim troops who died in Iraq and Afghanistan as an example of the national unity he hoped to inspire by voting for Obama last year.

“If we’re looking to heal divides and bridge gaps, I’m out there every day educating people about our history, culture and contributions to America,” said Baadani, the founder of the Association of Patriotic Arab Americans in Military, the support and outreach group he formed after 9/11. “We don’t have to prove we’re not terrorists. We have to prove we’re willing to work to educate our fellow countrymen.”

APAAM is an informal network Baadani put together both to provide support for other Arab and Muslim-American service personnel and to show other American communities that their communities eagerly serve in the military. It takes no money and has only as many as 200 members — active and retired military — around the country representing the group. Its outreach efforts, Baadani said in an interview, are mostly centered on the group’s website, which features stories of prominent Arab and Muslim American officers like Gen. John Abizaid, who served as commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East from 2003 to 2007. Baadani is an eager proponent of not letting even minor slights go unanswered. He replied to a derogatory email forward by writing respectfully to its author, “As a Muslim American Marine, I have lead Marines in combat on numerous occasions and since 9/11, I participated in counter-terrorism operations to pursue those terrorist bastards who attacked our country … The attachments I sent you will give you some other information regarding Muslim patriotism in helping defend our country.”

The military does not keep statistics on how many Arab-Americans or Muslims serve in its ranks. APAAM’s website estimates that 3,500 Arab-Americans and 6,000 Muslims currently serve in the military. It’s a sensitive subject. Baadani even said that he was a Methodist before his first deployment overseas, to Lebanon in 1984, explaining that he “didn’t want to attract attention to myself.” Post-Ft. Hood, the military has shown additional signs of apprehension about discussing Arab and Muslim Americans in the ranks. Although an Air Force sergeant based in Florida named Bassel Noori expressed interest in commenting for this piece, Noori’s chain of command denied a request for an interview. The Air Force, explained a public-affairs officer for Nouri’s unit, did not want to appear to be expressing a perspective on what it considered an internal Army matter.

That sensitivity makes APAAM all the more important to its members. One of Baadani’s first recruits was Ace Montasser, a Marine from Brooklyn, N.Y., whom Baadani met when both were stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C., shortly after the 9/11 attacks. “I was just a Marine under his wing,” remembered Montasser, an Iraq veteran and a 27-year-old radio DJ in Detroit. Baadani got in touch the old fashioned way: he knew Montasser’s cousin, and so placed a phone call asking if the young Marine would be interested in helping form a support organization for servicemembers like them. The organization grew from there, through family contacts and emails to friends. Media appearances soon followed, as reporters called for feature pieces about American Muslim military service.

Like several interviewed for this article, Montasser said his fellow Marines “never had an issue” with his heritage. Nidal Allis, a former Air Force intelligence expert who served in the Pentagon on 9/11, said the worst he has experienced was ignorant comments on his Facebook page from non-servicemembers. Indeed, it has been notable how in the wake of Ft. Hood, the most prominent military voices have been those like Gen. George Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, who said in a televised interview that the Army had to take care not to indicate an unwelcomeness to Arabs and Muslims. Baadani said the Marine Corps reached out to him in 2006 to help advise the service on Middle East culture while Marines serve in Iraq. Many APAAM non-online events, accordingly, come at the military’s behest, like the post-Iftar feasts hosted either at the Pentagon or at military events in Muslim countries.

Baadani hastened to add that he has not received additional accounts about internal military discrimination against Arabs and Muslims after Ft. Hood. But Allis said that he felt as if Hasan’s alleged crimes have cast a dark cloud over him. “Personally, it’s been a little challenging,” said Allis, 34, who owns his own technology company in Colorado. “I have the same first name as him. He comes from the same village my family comes from, which is in Palestine. There’s definitely been some pressure. You see it on CNN, ‘can you truly trust Muslims,’ but they forget Muslims have been fighting for this country since the Revolutionary War.”

Montasser feared for his mother, whose headscarf, he worried, might make her a target. “It’s bad enough what the media is doing to us right now, but he made it worse,” Montasser said of Hasan. “He just ruined and trampled our reputation even more. He’s made it so much harder. Arabs are not going to feel safe on the street.”

Some writers have suggested after Ft. Hood that Muslim soldiers should receive exemptions from serving in Muslim countries after accounts emerged of Hasan’s distress of a possible deployment to Afghanistan. In 2004, the Army convicted a sergeant named Abdullah Webster of violating a lawful order after Webster said his religious beliefs prevented him from serving in Iraq. But Allis blasted the idea of Muslims opting out for service in Muslim countries for the impact it would have on military discipline.

“If you’re signing up to defend this country as I did, you take on that uniform with the risk you may have to go in and fight,” Allis said. “If you have problems with that, you shouldn’t sign up.”

While the military has not indicated that it will place additional scrutiny on Arabs or Muslims, some senators at a Government Reform Committee hearing last week endorsed the creation of guidelines for the military to recognize Islamic extremism. But the hearing was light on details on what “warning signs” might be part of those guidelines, although Jack Keane, an influential retired senior Army general who helped spearhead a crackdown on white supremacists in the Army, said it would be helpful for the military to create them.

Baadani declined to comment on developments in the Senate, saying he wanted to focus on engaging and educating those who distrust Arabs and Muslims, rather than appearing political. “I approach it from the perspective of tearing down a wall, and the only way to do that is to respect one another,” he said. “I just ask people [to] hear me out. That’s the approach I always take, and the example I set. You can’t change someone’s mindset by calling someone a racist — they get defensive, draw lines, dig their heels in.”

Instead, Baadani said, he hoped APAAM would continue to provide information on its website about Arab and Muslim contributions to America. But he added that he felt the environment for Arab and Muslim-Americans is much better now than after 9/11, even in the aftermath of Ft. Hood.

“The backlash towards our community is nowhere even close,” Baadani said. “I attribute that to the intellect and the resiliency of the American people. And that’s why I’m proud to be an American.”

cairirsletter

That would be the same religion that members of the U.S. military practice, to say nothing of about one-fifth of the world’s population. Who knows, there are probably some practitioners of that “savage religion” in Manzullo’s own congressional district!

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know – no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice – in this world, and the next.

Although this paragraph will get the conservatives howling about political correctness:

This generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have volunteered in a time of certain danger. They are part of the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.  They have served tour after tour of duty in distant, different and difficult places. They have stood watch in blinding deserts and on snowy mountains. They have extended the opportunity of self-government to peoples that have suffered tyranny and war. They are man and woman; white, black, and brown; of all faiths and stations – all Americans, serving together to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life.

What it also sounds like is … Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. Dana Priest reports:

The Army psychiatrist believed to have killed 13 people at Fort Hood warned a roomful of senior Army physicians a year and a half ago that to avoid “adverse events,” the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars against other Muslims.

At least we know now that extremists of all stripes agree that U.S. Muslims shouldn’t serve in the U.S. military, an institution through which so many Muslim-Americans have heroically given their lives for their country. The more polite version of this rancid argument is provided by none other than Bill Kristol.

Now is the time for a professional and legal backlash against the Muslim community and their leaders. Muslims know what materials are being taught in their mosques and they know many of the materials instruct young Muslims to kill innocent people who do not adhere to Sharia law. If Muslims do not want a backlash, then I would recommend a “house cleaning.” Stack every Saudi, al Qaeda, Pakistani, Taliban, Hamas, and Muslim Brotherhood piece of material from their mosque and have a bonfire. Tell the American, Jewish, and Muslim community this hatred will no longer be allowed in their mosques.

It was only nine short years ago when conservatives believed Muslims could become part of an enduring GOP coalition…

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding dozens of others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could “cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.”

“I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union. “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

But, as if Casey never said it, here’s the independent senator from Connecticut:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” labeled the shooting spree “the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11” and said that as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee he intended to investigate Major Hasan’s suspected motives and whether the Army “missed warning signs that should have led them to essentially discharge him.”

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have zero tolerance,” Senator Lieberman said. “He should have been gone.”

It’s important to ask the question of whether Hasan acted alone. The early evidence is that he did. But the question is appropriate, because the stakes are people’s lives.

But that’s the stake in Lieberman’s investigation, too. Inquiries like the one he described have an awful tendency to build the conclusion into the premise — turning constitutionally protected speech or religious behavior or dissent into troubling “signs,” when the person exercising his freedoms worships in a mosque and not a church or a synagogue. The soldiers who died at Ft. Hood did not serve their country to see it devolve into witchhunting.

Whole letter after the jump.

Jihad at Fort Hood

Every American this morning should be outraged not only about the murderous rampage against U.S. soldiers in Ft. Hood, Texas, by Major Nidal M. Hasan, but also by the sickening effort of Big Media, and even some U.S. officials, to deceive us about what has taken place.

For eight years we have been fighting radical Islamists around the world, and we have been the victims of jihadist attacks by lone radical Muslims repeatedly here in the U.S. Yet as the story broke of the carnage yesterday, 13 dead and 30 wounded, virtually every major media outlet, along with our own government, seemed to have as their main goal convincing us that the event had nothing to do with terrorism or radical Islam.

But minute-by-minute, more information is coming to light that can’t be ignored. We have found out that six months ago Major Hasan may have defended Muslim suicide bombers on his web page, comparing such acts to the sacrifice a U.S. solider makes when he falls on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers. Col. Terry Lee, who worked with the killer, said Major Hasan had said, “Muslims shouldn’t be fighting Muslims.” Back in June, when a Muslim convert assassinated a U.S. soldier at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, Col. Lee said that Major Hasan seemed happy about the event and that he was confronted by other officers. (You may recall that it took days for Obama to acknowledge that attack, yet the White House issued a rare Sunday statement when late-term abortionist George Tiller was killed.)

In recent weeks, while off the base, Major Hasan started wearing Arabic and religious clothing. He passed out Korans on the morning of the shooting. Survivors in the facility where Major Hasan went on the attack reported that he yelled, “Allahu Akbar,” (Allah is great) before he opened fire – the same words shouted by the jihadists on 9/11 and which have been repeated by our enemy in every attack since.

Nor is this an isolated incident. In June 2003, Sergeant Hasan K. Akbar attacked his fellow soldiers as they gathered in Kuwait to start the liberation of Iraq. He killed two officers and wounded many more. Numerous plots by American Muslims have been uncovered in recent years to attack Fort Dix, the Quantico Marine Corps base and other military facilities.

No one is suggesting that an Al Qaeda operative contacted Major Hasan and ordered yesterday’s attack. But the evidence certainly indicates that Major Hasan was becoming more and more committed to radical Islam and growing increasingly hostile to the American military that paid for his education and repeatedly promoted him. NPR reports, “Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work… He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues…”

I understand the media’s politically correct mindset. What is inexcusable is why the military and the FBI continue to be so reticent about acknowledging the nature of the enemy we are confronting. Instead of going into denial, our military, the FBI and other intelligence agencies need to admit the obvious. While thousands of loyal American Muslims have served in the military, and some have died with other Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are also “sleeper cells” or “sleeper individuals” who are jihadist ticking time bombs inside our own ranks. Similar attacks are inevitable the longer our leaders engage in self-deception. The brave men and women in uniform, who are on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq, should not have to worry about being killed at home by the same enemy they are fighting abroad.

Obama’s “Shout out”

As details of the Ft. Hood carnage poured in yesterday afternoon, the White House announced that President Obama would make a statement at a previously scheduled event. Close to 5:00 PM, cable stations switched to cover the president’s remarks as he was getting ready to speak at a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Interior Department. What happened next has callers to talk radio shows all over the country outraged.

Instead of bringing a somber demeanor into the room, the president seemed to many to be light-hearted and frivolous. He thanked various staffers, and then said he wanted to give a “shout out” to Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, who he incorrectly identified as a “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner. After several minutes of banter, the president read a somber, brief statement about the shootings. Increasingly, this White House seems “tone deaf.” How hard is it to realize that this was not a time for joking or “shout outs.” In fact, it would have been more appropriate to cancel the speech and make a reassuring statement from the White House on the events in Texas.

This morning, the president made another statement ordering flags to fly at half-staff until Veterans Day. But he also cautioned us not to “jump to conclusions” until we have all the facts. (The last time there was a pending law enforcement issue, the president was the first to jump to conclusions when he said the Cambridge Police Department “acted stupidly” for arresting his friend Professor Louis Gates.)

My favorite response to that comes from VetVoice’s Richard Allen Smith:

A dumb f—— idea, not the least of reasons being that Major Hasan’s records indicated he had no religious preference”, so he wouldn’t have been screened anyway.

But this is the way it goes. We were told by Fox News that to blame right-wingers for the actions of George Tiller’s murderer or the anti-Semite who shot up the Holocaust Museum was out of line. But Muslim soldiers — people who guard the freedoms that Fox bleats about with jingoistic sanctimony — are to be slandered by association. This is a disgrace to the memories of Spc. Kareem R. Khan, Capt. Humayun Saqib Khan, and so many others who have given their lives for this country.

Update: Via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter, conservative writer David Frum provides an elegant and moving illustration of this point.

In the past few months, we’ve seen a number of shootings performed by white men with right-wing fringe beliefs–but while an attempt to assign the responsibility for the murder of George Tiller, or the killing of police in Pittsburgh, or the assault on the Holocaust Museum to white men as a whole would rightfully be seen as idiotic, there are those who sit poised and prepared assign the alleged actions of one man to an entire people. This is, quite frankly, the best reaction groups like Al Qaeda could hope for–the strength of their narrative of a war between Islam and the West ultimately rests on our own actions. We should not indulge them or those that share a similar worldview.

I wrote a very long piece about Serwer’s last point way back in 2005.