Your dismissal of rather telling evidence is almost as offensive as the overreaction of those who would take it all the way, mitigating circumstances or explanatory context be damned.
Why don’t you wait and see where this goes, and join constructively in this conversation. And by constructively I mean providing facts if you know them and opinions if you wish - and most importantly knowing the one from the other.
This case shows that everyone from Virginia should be locked up. You can’ t be too careful!
Good thing I’m not from here. I’m from Pittsburgh. Though given recent history, that doesn’t help either.
Not evidence, no. And the Takbir is not a “Jihad cry.” It’s used by all practicing Muslims in practically all manner of religious and daily life.
I find the reports that he said it to be a little dubious – a little too pat (witnesses are notoriously unreliable in situations like this), but even if he did, it means nothing. It certainly doesn’t rule out plain old mental illness, and it’s still just one nutjob acting alone.
Nobody ever tries this kind of sweeping religious blame after Christian acts of violence or terrorism.
Evidence of what?
Does the newly-revealed fact that multiple witnesses said that Major Hasan said, “Allah akhbar,” before shooting cause you to change this evaluation?
Well, I’m not sure that those factors are mutally exclusive.
Absolutely correct. This is no more an indictment of Islam than an IRA bomber’s blowing up a pub is an indictment of Christianity.
I guess I can only quote the Federal Rules of Evidence. “‘Relevant evidence’ means evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.”
Yeah, it’s sure as Hell evidence. Odds a non-Muslim-terrorist would shout “Allahu Akhbar” before a terror spree? Nil. Odds an Islamist terrorist would shout it? More than nil. Thus “more probable” his motives were those of Islamist terror. Thus “relevant evidence.”
Clearly a phrase that 19 year old high school grad conscripts from BFE Oklahoma and Central Texan yahoos have at the tips of their tongue to place in his mouth. An obvious, pat frame job!
Of course not. I don’t even fimd the claim credible, much less significant.
Even if he said it, how would that eliminate mental illness as an explanation? If a Christian praises Jesus after bombing an abortion clinic, do you blame Christianity?
Does the alleged shouting of the Takbir (a fact not actually technically in evidence yet) make mental illness any less probable as an explanation?
As much as you must be looking forward to Kristallnacht USA, let’s wait until some more evidence comes in, 'mkay?
As a matter of fact, they do know it. It’s a well known phrase and cliched one to imagine in the mouths of terrorist.
Nobody?
It would be irresponsible for me to ask you to cite nobody - that’s hard. But I can ask for you to retract if I find somebody, and that was pathetically easy.
Dan Barker, Freethought Today, May 1995.
The irony is that these statements were completely misplaced, as McVeigh was an agnostic.
Do you honestly think you’re making some kind of point?
I repeat, nobody blames Christianity when Christians commit acts of terrorism or violence, but even if you can scour the internet to find somebody who does, so fucking what? Does that mean it’s valid to blame Islam for one crazy Muslim? What point do you think you’re making?
There are lots of reasons he could have used that term. If being hassled for being a muslim was a contributing factor in his breakdown, he could be using in a way to basically say, "HERE’S YOUR FUCKING MUSLIM NOW, HOW DO YOU LIKE HIM? bang
If devout he may have been offering it up as a prayer as he assumed he was a dead man once he started.
Or he could be just nuts and apeing a cliché.
The evidence is not in yet.
Sounds like they are pretty desperate for blood in the Ford Hood area. One more person has died (or maybe it’s two, since Hasan is alive), with 13 people now reported dead.
Hasan is on a ventilator but in stable condition. Maybe at some point they can just ask him. But based on what we know so far, I wouldn’t expect his motive to be clearly religious or clearly “other.” It sounds first and foremost like he did not want to be deployed overseas. I saw one article that said he would have preferred Afghanistan to Iraq - so you can speculate he might’ve been uncomfortable involved in a war against Arabs - but he was supposed to be deployed to Afghanistan and still did this. And there are indications he had prior mental problems and was horrified by what he had heard in reports by returning soldiers. ETA: And yes, there is the reported harrassment angle, although he never filed a complaint about it with anyone.
So taking all of that together, and not knowing if he was particularly religious, can we conclude this was religiously motivated even if he did yell “Allahu Akbar?” I lean toward no.
Not at all. In fact, I’d say the leading candidate, the best horse in the race right now, is mental illness.
But this is why I mentioned above that religion and mental illness were not mutually exclusive. If he, because of a mental disease or defect, was predisposed to believe that al-Quada had the right idea about things, then it was clearly a mental illness, AND it was clearly entwined with religion.
See, Diogenes, you’re doing it again. You have a combination of reasonable and unreasonable positions here. You won’t give an inch on anything you’ve staked out, not until six kinds of incontrovertible evidence is shoved at you from six different sources. A reasonable person here would agree that, while more evidence may certainly change the picture, the prevailing evidence now, uncontradicted by any other, is that the guy shouted the Takbir. Does he need to have had three webcams trained on him while he recited the Shahadah before you acknowledge that there was obviously some religious element in what he did? It doesn’t mean the guy was sane, it doesn’t mean that Islam is tarred in any way by this, it just means that a probably nutso guy fixated on a religious aspect to some degree before committing mass murder.
Today, actually, but the only one to die was the gunman.
Well, I certainly wasn’t blaming Islam myself. But in not blaming Islam, I wasn’t resorting to wild and easily disproven claims - which by now have become your stock in trade.
I might agree with much of what you are saying in general, but it would be nice if you could back it up with something besides your own hot air.
As do I. But you’ve just asked a different question. “Religiously motivated” suggests that the prime motivator was religious, and there’s not any particular evidence for that. But the exchange that got me into this was Magiver’s: The shooting clearly has connections to his religious beliefs.
This is a much more supportable statement, because it doesn’t exclude the very real probability that we’re dealing with mental illness, an illness that was somehow intertwined with religion. Given his yell at the beginning of the rampage, it seems blind to argue there’s NO connection to his religious beliefs. Absent more evidence, it’s equally fallacious to say the shooting was MOTIVATED by his religious beliefs.