@Ceili,
Ceili wrote:
Yes I am. However, each time a killer goes on a rampage at his work place or school, there are always issues with what they believe.
So, I'll ask it again...
Aside from his religion what makes him any different than others that have gone postal? They are all insane on some level, they all believe they have been persecuted on some level and they all choose violence against the people who are innocents. It's terrible but it doesn't necessarily make them terrorists, in the classic sense.
Just indiscriminate killers.........
What is insanity?
We tend to freely toss the term around when there are incidents of violence because, in part, we cannot imagine ourselves or anyone we respect or care for committing such crimes.
These individuals must be insane to do such horrible things! They must be, because the alternative is that they are simply evil, and so many of us consider ourselves far too sophisticated to believe in any so primal a concept as evil.
That is, of course, unless the monsters prey on members of a class anointed as Sacred Victims. So when a young gay man is tied to a fence and tortured to death, his killers are monsters, not deranged and unfathomable. When an elderly black man is dragged in chains behind a truck until he dies, his killers are monsters motivated by an evil hatred and whether or not their Daddies beat them as kids, girls spurned them as pimply youths, and classmates bullied them in Junior High is totally immaterial. They are monsters.
You know what? I agree. They are monsters and they are evil. I don't care how their victims can be classified other than as innocents.
It doesn't matter if Hasan couldn't find a woman, or that he was made fun of because he is pudgy, bald or a Muslim. There are vastly more people who suffer from the rough edges of life and who do not go on killing sprees than those that do.
If he thought the people he was killing were trying to kill him, or if he thought the bullets he was firing were simply cosmetically marking them as bad guys, he would be insane.
He didn't. He knew he was killing and maiming those he was firing at and he wanted it to be so. He was very much in touch with reality. Perhaps we will never know for certain, but what do you believe his state of mind was during his rampage?
Which is more likely?
He was lost in a fog of hallucinations and disassociation, unaware of the consequence of his actions
Or
He was exultant, flooded with endorphins triggered by religious ecstasy and an overwhelming intoxication of raw power.
How can I be sure he was the latter and not the former? Just look at how he made his way to his explosion of violence.
He followed a path of Islamist extremism - jihad - to which he was emotionally and intellectually attracted.
There is far more reason to believe his rampage was a planned, intentional act, than a spontaneous and inexplicable instance of insane behavior - "going postal."
To many a Western mind, the fact that he could not have imagined that he would survive his rampage is proof of his insanity, and that might be true if anyone could prove there is no afterlife.
Believing that God will send you to Paradise by virtue of the fact that you have died killing non-believers may be ignorant, stupid and illogical, but it is not insane.
And guess what? There are far, far more people on earth who accept articles of faith than those who do not. Are they all insane?
Dismissing Hasan has a random nut case not only supports ridiculous PC notions, it makes people feel safer.
Random killers are far rarer than natural disasters, far rarer than shark attacks, far rarer than deadly disease.
If every once in a while some nut goes postal, well if you happen to be caught in the line of fire, it just bad luck, but if there are people amongst us who are deliberately seeking opportunities to murder and maim us because of organized beliefs and not chaotic brain storms, well, that's a lot scarier.
It should be.
