What do you think, what do you feel, when you hear this name — John Allen Muhammad?
If you live in the Washington, D.C., area, the name calls back a stunning array of emotions and images. The sniper siege made ordinary people — with good reason — afraid to pump gas, to take children to school, to wait for a bus and a host of other everyday tasks.
Now that you’ve heard the name, let me ask another question: Based on what you remember about the mainstream media coverage, what do you know about the sniper’s motives? In other words, why did he do it?
Well, while the rest of the nation was struggling to grasp the “why” in the “who, what, when, where, why and how” of Fort Hood, folks inside the Beltway were wrestling with their thoughts and emotions about the execution of Muhammad. It was hard not to to link the two somehow, whether that linkage is valid or not. That’s my point. The cases have little or nothing to do with one another, few if any connecting themes, but how would you know that?
Why did he do it? In one execution story, the Washington Post notes:
What did it teach us? What did we learn from that awful autumn?
Not much, says Police Chief Charlie T. Deane of Prince William County, where Dean H. Meyers, 53, stepped from his Mazda at a Sunoco on Oct. 9, 2002, and was felled by a bullet to the head — the ninth of 13 victims shot that month, the seventh of 10 who were killed.
“The sad thing is, the biggest lesson from this is that two fools with a rifle can put an entire region of the country in a state of absolute fear,” Deane says.
It might have been anyone in the cross hairs of that .223-caliber Bushmaster in those 22 days and nights when millions cowered from a roving, unseen menace — when ballfields and school yards fell still; jittery motorists squatted like baseball catchers to fill their gas tanks; ubiquitous white box trucks loomed suspicious. …
The stalkers were elusive; the attacks, indiscriminate.
What did the attacks mean to Muhammad? Why did he think that he did what he did?
That’s where the problems began, for the mainstream press. I have always been troubled that reporters were afraid to discuss the sniper’s name and his faith.
Why?
This week, James Taranto summed up my concerns perfectly in one of his “Best of the Web Today” essays at the Wall Street Journal. Click here to read that, with lots of helpful links.
Here’s the bottom line: Reporters needed to talk about the precise nature of Muhammad’s faith in order to separate him from mainstream Muslims. It was terrible, cruel even, to leave readers with his name and his evil acts and say, “That’s that.”
Here’s a chunk of what Taranto had to say, while thinking about press coverage of the sniper and then Fort Hood:
We got to thinking about the similarities with the Fort Hood story — but then we went back and read some of the contemporaneous coverage of Muhammad’s crimes and were struck by the differences.
For one, although Muhammad and Fort Hood suspect Nidal Hasan were both Muslims, Muhammad was a convert who had joined the Nation of Islam, an eccentric American sect that focuses on racial (black) rather than religious supremacy. Most of the reports on Muhammad’s execution omit the Nation of Islam connection, leaving the impression, among those who’ve forgotten it, that Muhammad is just another Muslim. …
“I am God,” unlike Hasan’s reported exclamation, “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”), is not something that Muslims normally say. Yet although the connection between Muhammad’s religion and his crimes was much less clear than appears to be the case at Fort Hood, our cursory review of the 2002 press coverage suggests that reporters back then … were more straightforward in dealing with it. And although Muhammad was a veteran — and had, unlike Hasan, actually seen combat — journalists do not seem to have rushed to fit the story to the usual crazy-veteran narrative, as they have been doing with Hasan.
Some have detected in the Fort Hood coverage a return to a pre-9/11 mindset, and there is some truth to this. In particular, the left-liberal tendency to stereotype servicemen and veterans as psychopaths, suckers and victims is a return to form. But the bending over backward to explain away the role of religious fanaticism in the Fort Hood massacre is, it seems to us, something new — something distinctly post-9/11, or post-post-9/11.
In other words, a lack of press information about the beliefs of these men is not good for mainstream Muslims. In order to separate these men and their beliefs from those of other Muslims, one must be willing to discuss those beliefs in factual terms, to the degree that this is possible. It’s impossible, in the long run, to defend the beliefs and lives of mainstream Muslims without discussing Islam and the conflicts inside that complex, global faith — even if that means talking about the Nation of Islam and how its non-mainstream beliefs may or may not have affected someone like Muhammad.
Silence does not help. Ignorance does not protect anyone.
Let me ask the journalists and academics who read this blog: Does that make sense?
 | Posted at 9:47 pm |  Print
| Permalink | Trackback |
Comments (11) |
November 15, 2009, at 11:17 pm
There have been plenty of folks in the media who have attempted to conflate the Ft. Hood massacre to an act of religiously inspired terrorism so I do not agree with you that everyone in the media is trying to “explain away the role of religious fanaticism in the Fort Hood massacre…”. I would agree that fewer people (media, elected leaders) have jumped on the “Islamic terrorism” bandwagon in this case. I think that is post-post 9/11 and that is a good thing.
November 15, 2009, at 11:29 pm
AFEEF:
Please address the subject of my post, which is the impact of silence on the specific beliefs of Nadal and Muhammad on mainstream Muslims.
So you think it is good to leave the public with the impression — through silence — that the sniper was an ordinary Muslim?
November 16, 2009, at 2:09 am
I have a problem commenting on this piece because I consider Taranto a radical right whack job who will smear and distort people without shame and without conscience as the above collection of words proves.
November 16, 2009, at 8:20 am
JERRY:
Then try responding to the actual point of the post, the point about the mainstream press and information about the Nation of Islam, etc.
When in doubt, respond to the post.
November 16, 2009, at 9:20 am
I completely agree. But as you have noted, the press does not get religion. It has trouble spelling “God,” never mind parsing out the nuances in beliefs as alien to the mainstream American experience as Islam.
As you have also noted, it is incorrect to say “Islam teaches” rather than “Muslims teach.” A press corps that cannot tell you what divides Shias from Sunnis and how Sufism fits into the whole picture, never mind whom Alawites and the Druze cannot be expected to do what you rightly want them to do.
That leaves specialized media and that’s a problem: the people best qualified to do the explaining occupy a corner of the intertubes that few Americans, especially — to be blunt — conservatives ever visit and then only to discount them. Do you expect more conservatives sites to link to the work of Reza Aslan or Juan Cole? I don’t. For that matter, do the people at CNN, MSNBC even know whom they are? (Fox? Please.)
November 16, 2009, at 9:37 am
As an ordinary reader, I always want to know why the bad guy did it. And a Muslim name is sort of an elephant in the room. It seems to me the media usually tries to avoid feeding the “all Muslims are X” stereotypes, and I’m glad, though at the same time if religious motivations do play a role in something like this it should be squarely faced.
November 16, 2009, at 10:59 am
It is damaging to leave either shooter’s motivation up in the air and leave only the fact that he is a Muslim standing. Your point is correct.
But I’m with Jerry about your casual passing along of the left-liberal stereotype. You have some sensitive corns, Professor Mattingly, as you’ve shown in spiking comments of mine that had no intent to offend. You should be more careful about treading on others’ toes.
November 16, 2009, at 12:18 pm
Terry:
When I hear “John Allen Muhammad,” I think, “serial killer,” in the same way when I hear Bernie Madoff, I think, “thief,” and when I hear “John Geoghan,” I think pedophile.
When Madoff’s scheme unraveled, there was no rush to quote rabbis saying that mainstream Jews don’t believe in Ponzi schemes. There was no rush in any of the pedophile to find theologians to says, mainstream Catholics don’t believe in molesting children. (Geoghan was a priest, and there was a great deal of criticism for how church officials handled his case, but no one said, ‘Oh, he’s a Catholic, that’s why he molests children.’”
John Allen Muhammad, Bernie Madoff, Father Geoghan, even Maj. Nadal are criminals first, religious people second.
November 16, 2009, at 3:56 pm
Terry, it’s true I responded to your post and not the original story but I often do that. And when you give such a large amount of space in your post to someone who in no way deserves it, except perhaps on the stopped clock being right twice a day basis, I think it’s justifiable commenting on that. The fact that he sums up your concerns perfectly presumably including that hatched job he does on the left which you chose to include sadly changes how I view you as a journalist and commentator on journalism.
November 16, 2009, at 4:04 pm
JERRY:
Amazing. The fact that he sums up my concerns on the issue of the post is not enough? You feel that one has to agree with everything a writer says in order to quote his views?
Wow, I thought you were more liberal than that, in the classic, marketplace sense of the word.
Please, disagree with him. I do, often. But I thought his views on these points were worth sharing. You simply believe that I PRESUMABLY have to agree with everything he says.
Is that true when I quote the New Republic? Obama? Others?
He summed up my point of view perfectly on the subject of the post. Come on man, calm down.
We’re done on this. Take it off the thread. Now.
November 16, 2009, at 4:15 pm
I was living in NoVa for 9/11 and the DC Sniper one year later. I think it was the DC Sniper era was when our parish started praying St. Michael prayer after EVERY Mass. I recall there was so much bad information put out—the police and media could not get the facts straight as to what kind of vehicle the suspects drove.
Because it was about a year after 9-11, the idea of Islamic terrorism was pretty real. I agree that the media did not explore John A Muhammed’s religion or its role in his murder spree. And b/c Ft Hood episode by a Muslim soldier occurred just as JAM’s execution was scheduled [and carried out by anti-death penalty Catholic Gov Tim Kaine, BTW]it all seems linked and similar. The media (and some govt authorities) seem to think that if there’s no al Qaeda membership card (and Hasan appears to have a business card indicating some radical Islamic views), it cannot be terrorism. Not all terrorism is “organized” akin to organized crime syndicates. There are independent operators which the media do not seem to acknowledge as terrorists.
Yes, I think Muslims are also served by the media exploring the radical views of Muslim terrorists and distinguishing them from the mainstream of the faith.