A Soldier of Allah in the U.S. Army

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At a pretrial hearing in his military trial on July 9, 2013, one of the most notorious recent assassins inside the United States explained his creed, his allegiances and intentions clearly. Hasan, a major in the U.S. Army who admitted to having murdered thirteen people and wounded thirty at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, complained that he was being made to wear an Army uniform. “I can’t take any pride in wearing this uniform,” he explained, “it represents an enemy of Islam. I’m being forced to wear this uniform.”

Many other Muslims wear that uniform to this day. Are they as ashamed of it as Nidal Hasan was? No one dares to ask. That would be “Islamophobic.”

During his trial it was revealed that not long after the attack, he told a panel of mental health professionals: “I’m paraplegic and could be in jail for the rest of my life. However, if I died by lethal injection I would still be a martyr.” He didn’t mean a martyr like St. Sebastian or Thomas More. In his context, a martyr was someone who killed on behalf of Islam and was killed in the process, in accord with the Qur’an’s promise of Paradise to those who “fight in the cause of Allah” and “kill and are killed” (9:111).

During the pretrial phase, Hasan quizzed potential jurors about their opinions of the Taliban, Sharia (Islamic law) and the Islamic faith. Then during his trial, it was revealed that not long after the shootings, he had told the mental health panel: “I don’t think what I did was wrong because it was for the greater cause of helping my Muslim brothers.” The U.S., he said, was targeting those Muslim brothers in an “illegal war.”

That war, of course, was the one in Afghanistan, where Hasan had been about to be deployed. Considering the war against the Taliban to be a war against Islam, he – in his own words – realized that he “was on the wrong side,” and “switched sides.” Dr. Tonya Kozminksi, who had worked with Hasan at a hospital in Fort Hood, testified that several weeks before Hasan’s jihad attack, Hasan warned that if the Army ever decided to send him to Afghanistan, “They will pay.”

While many Americans, both Muslim and non-Muslim, vehemently opposed the Afghan war, Hasan’s expression of support for the Taliban was unusual. The U.S. government and establishment media generally take it for granted that no Muslims in the U.S. or, indeed, anywhere else in the world, support the likes of the Taliban except “extremists” who had hijacked and misinterpreted Islam – and that there were no “extremists” among Muslims in the U.S., or at most an insignificant number. Yet Hasan, a naturalized American citizen (until he renounced his citizenship shortly before his trial), was obviously an “extremist” who had somehow, despite his “extremism,” not only joined the U.S. Army but had risen to the rank of major.

He did this, moreover, although his “extremism” was on abundant display for years before he opened fire at Fort Hood. Hasan had for a considerable time raised eyebrows with his statements about his own allegiances, routinely harassing his colleagues with harangues about Islam, and proclaiming that he was “Muslim first and American second.” His business card read “SOA,” a well-known acronym among jihadists for “Soldier of Allah.”

In June 2007, Hasan gave a PowerPoint presentation to his coworkers, in which he proposed to show “what the Qur’an inculcates in the minds of Muslims and the potential implications this may have for the U.S. military.” He said, “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”

An official who spoke to some of those who attended recounted that “Hasan apparently gave a long lecture on the Qur’an and talked about how if you don’t believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You’re set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat.” According to AP, “he gave a class presentation questioning whether the U.S.-led war on terror was actually a war on Islam. And students said he suggested that Shariah, or Islamic law, trumped the Constitution and he attempted to justify suicide bombings.”

In it, Hasan argued that Muslims must not fight against other Muslims (as is mandated by Qur’an 4:92), and that the Qur’an also mandates both defensive and offensive jihad against unbelievers (by implication including the United States itself, as the world’s foremost infidel polity), in order to impose upon those unbelievers the hegemony of Islamic law. He quoted the Qur’anic verse calling for war against the “People of the Book” (that is, mainly Jews and Christians) until they “pay the tax in acknowledgment of [Islamic] superiority and they are in a state of subjection” (9:29). Hasan seems then to have been telling the assembled (and no doubt stunned) physicians, who had been expecting a lecture about psychiatry, that Muslims had a religious obligation to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as inferiors under their rule. His clear implication was that Americans were included in this.

In line with that idea, Hasan warned that Muslim soldiers should not be sent to fight for the U.S. in Muslim countries, invoking — as evidence of what could happen if Muslims were sent to Muslim countries — the earlier jihad murders by another Muslim serviceman, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who threw grenades into a tent full of American soldiers and killed two of his commanding officers in Kuwait in March 2003, in an attack also motivated by his Islamic faith.

But few have learned that lesson, even to this day.