By now, many readers may have seen Tunku Varadarajan’s controversial column for Forbes from last week, “Going Muslim.” In it, Varadarajan coins a new term to describe Major Nidal Hasan’s rampage at Fort Hood two weeks ago. “Going Muslim” is Varadarajan’s variation of “going postal,” a phrase coined a few years ago, after a string of (non-Muslim) U.S. postal workers went on killing sprees. Here is how Varadarajan defines the term:
This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.
The most irksome part of Varadarajan’s column for me was the following paragraph:
The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage—the camouflage of integration—in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of “harassment” as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not “snap” in the “postal” manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away—to a neighbor—a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious “departure.”
In fact, reports from Hasan’s colleagues strongly suggest a profile of a person who was borderline psychotic for several years, but who finally snapped around 2007. Yes, he gave away his broccoli on the day he went on a shooting spree. But that is in fact entirely in keeping with how psychotics behave.
What Varadarajan doesn’t realize is that the kind of paranoid argument he is making about immigrants in “camouflage” could very easily be used against any other immigrant group, including Hindus, as a pretext for mistrust or active discrimination.
Varadarajan also make a claim about “integration” into American society that is simply not supported by any facts. The diverse groups of immigrants who are Muslim have done just fine in terms of their economic performance, civil participation, etc. By coining this pernicious phrase, and by promoting an argument based self-evidently on bigotry, Varadarajan has shown us why we no longer need to take anything he says seriously.
Much of Varadarajan’s animus is really directed at affirmative action, and seems to be an extension of the post 9/11 claim he made several years ago, which Manish responded to here, that Muslims really ought to be singled out for profiling, especially in connection with mass transit. There are some unconfirmed reports that Nidal Hasan, despite signs that he was incompetent and unhinged, may have been treated with kid gloves by his superiors at Walter Reed who wanted to avoid seeming to persecute a Muslim colleague. If proven true, they would support Varadarajan’s claim, with which I agree, that political correctness ought not be a consideration in situations like Hasan’s. But I have my doubts about how significant political correctness really was; it seems as likely that the army bureaucrats supervising Hasan simply didn’t want to deal with the arduous and extended process for firing him.
Even if the political correctness claim is supported by facts that will come out of the forthcoming investigation, the focus of our concern should be the Army protocols for assessing mentally ill service members, not Muslims as a group.
Needless to say, Varadarajan’s column has caused quite a firestorm of controversy in the NYU community. You can see some of the responses, including one from the president of the university, here.
