Belen Fernandez doesn’t exactly come right out and say it, but she comes as close as one can while hedging her bets. In this Aljazeera post (”The Fort Hood shooting should be analysed within the larger context of US militarism”), she supposedly takes the “larger view,” but in effect blames U.S. militarism for the shooting:
It should thus not be overly startling, perhaps, when US soldiers conditioned to operate in such fashion and to view human life as devoid of value turn their guns on fellow military personnel - and on themselves. In fact, these episodes could be construed as symbolic of the military institution’s contributions to individual dehumanisation and alienation from humanity.
By “in such fashion,” she means the culture of violence in which military personnel are trained and continue to exist. She rambles on:
Although Specialist Lopez’s [the alleged Fort Hood shooter) precise circumstances aren’t known, his reported “behavioural and mental health issues” can’t be seen as occurring in a vacuum - as much as the US political-military establishment likes to portray such incidents as the isolated fallout of individual defectiveness rather than as evidence of a diseased system.
In her post, she laments how our first instinct is to credit the attack to terrorism*, but she apparently has no similar compulsion to blame a “diseased system” for the actions of an individual. Even though the first Food Hood (calculated) attack by Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan that killed 13 and injured 32, was indeed a terrorist attack. .
Some people will go to any lengths to feed their knee-jerk ideology.
*The trotting out of the possibility of terrorist connivance in the incident is, of course, unsurprising. In fact, the terrorist menace has become so institutionalised in US discourse and analysis that one half-expects to open the newspaper in the morning to find reports to the effect of: “A collision on such-and-such highway killed four people last night. Terrorism did not appear to be the motive.”
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