Vol. 73/No. 47      December 7, 2009

This column will take up questions about the Fort Hood shooting and the government’s “diversity” policy in the armed forces. Our starting point is complete opposition to Washington’s wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and anywhere else in the world.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist who is Muslim and of Palestinian descent, has been charged in the killing of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood November 5. Eyewitnesses report that as he stood up to fire on unarmed troops in a processing center he yelled out, “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!)

In June 2007 during a classroom presentation he said the “Department of Defense should allow Muslim soldiers the option of being released as ‘conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events,” according to the Washington Post.

Hasan believed the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan was a war against Islam and opposed it. Scheduled to be deployed soon to Iraq or Afghanistan, he told family members he did not want to go. He had tried to get discharged for several years but his superior officers would not release him.

Accounts from patients that he proselytized them, and other complaints from colleagues, led the army to review his fitness to serve, but it found no reason to dismiss him.

At the November 7 public meeting SWP national secretary Jack Barnes explained that the U.S. rulers are going out of their way to promote Blacks, Latinos, and increasingly Arabic-speaking soldiers as officers. They pursue “diversity” not out of concern about discrimination, but rather to have an officer corps whose racial and national composition more closely resembles the ranks they will command. The capitalists view this as crucial to lead the imperialist fighting force they are putting together for their next decades of war.

So concerned are they to keep Arabic-speaking soldiers in the armed forces that even at the funeral for the 13 Fort Hood soldiers, Obama continued to call the shooting “incomprehensible.” But everyone attending the ceremony knew full well that the shooting was a political act, whatever Hasan’s mental state may have been.

It is true that rightist forces will seize on this incident to whip up anti-Muslim and anti-Arabic prejudice, as well as opposition to affirmative action. They and the military brass can be counted on to try to use the shooting to clamp down on soldiers’ right to express political views. But that doesn’t mean communists should portray the killing of the soldiers as having any progressive character whatsoever. The Fort Hood shooting was a terrorist attack.

One formulation in the article that was in error, however, is the description of the troops as “workers in uniform.” While workers may join the U.S. military, it does not change its imperialist character or in whose interest they fight—the wealthy property owners.

The Militant used the term “Islamist-style”—as distinct from “Islamic”—to describe the Fort Hood shooting because “Islamist” describes a political perspective, a belief that society should be ruled by a Muslim theocracy or caliphate. This is the reactionary outlook of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and most rightist groups using Islam to justify a political course. The vast majority of Muslims, in fact, reject the Islamists’ actions.

Obama’s comment that no one should “jump to conclusions” about the motive for the Fort Hood attack was not an attempt to deflect anti-Muslim attacks. It was to deflect attacks on the government’s phony “diversity” program, which is a cover for what it’s not doing: carrying out genuine affirmative action that uproots the discrimination against the great mass of workers who are Black or of other oppressed nationalities. They are not sharing in “diversity.” They remain the first fired, and the last hired.
 
 
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