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Identity and Incidence

Defining Terror

December 7, 2005: Daniel McGowan was arrested in connection to a series of arsons. The arrest was one of a dozen, the culmination of the FBI’s Operation Backfire, an investigation into acts of ecoterrorism.

August 5, 2012: Wade Michael Page, a known white supremacist, killed six at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. The FBI investigated the case as an act of domestic terrorism.

November 5, 2009: Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed thirteen fellow soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. Given Hasan’s communiqués with Anwar al-Awlaki, the case was widely referred to as an act of homegrown terrorism.

“We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing,” President Obama said somberly as he relayed a request for Americans not to jump to conclusions in the wake of the Fort Hood shooting. Critics pounced, claiming that Obama, not a half year after his “New Beginnings” speech in Cairo, was playing politics with the lives of American servicemen and -women. Beyond the right’s Islamophobia or disdain for Obama, the exchange illustrates a more general and much older problem: namely, that dubbing an individual or group as terrorist (or, in this case, not) is an inherently “political” act. Much bemoaned, academic after pundit after politician continue to attempt to construct a definition of terrorism that might move above such politics. One of the most widely cited is the “consensus definition” of terrorism studies scholar Alex Schmid:

Terrorism refers to on the one hand a doctrine about the presumed effectiveness of a special form or tactic of fear-generating, coercive political violence and, on the other hand, to a conspiratorial practice of calculated, demonstrative, direct violent action without legal or moral restraints, targeting mainly civilians and non-combatants, performed for its propagandistic and psychological effects on various audiences and conflict parties.1

Evident from Schmid’s definition is that the so-called problem of politics associated with terrorism is not merely a matter of application (i.e., who counts as a terrorist) but is integral to the definition of terrorism itself. In his survey of academic definitions, “political”—that is, the nature of, or motive for, an act—is the second most commonly cited element of terrorism after “violence or force” (he conjoins the two in his definition). Thus, distinguishing the violence of crime, however heinous, from that of terrorism pivots on the ability to clearly determine whether an action is motivated by personal gain or politics—in moments of psychosis, it might be neither. So deeply ingrained is this thinking that in the aftermath of violence, news media coverage and government hearings are dedicated to uncovering the perpetrator’s motivation and whether or not she intended for the act to send a message to an audience beyond her direct victim(s).

Yet, as information rolled in about Nidal Malik Hasan, determining the nature of his motive became no easier. Featured on the cover of Time magazine two and a half weeks after the shooting, “TERRORIST?” covers Hasan’s almost expressionless eyes; the image taken from his military file. At this point, authorities and the public had learned that Hasan had communicated with a radical cleric. But they also learned of his potential psychological issues. In this chapter I do not engage in the futile labor of proposing a definition of terrorism that might somehow provide a way around this impasse.2 Instead, I descend from the mythologized air above politics and into its ground, charting the maneuvers, tensions, and debates initiated by efforts to mark three very different individuals as (eco, domestic, and homegrown) terrorists—Daniel McGowan, Wade Michael Page, and Nidal Malik Hasan.

The three cases that make up this chapter reveal not only that the determination of the nature of a motive itself is a matter of politics, but more importantly, that it involves a peculiar kind of valuation. I argue that the transformation of violence into terrorism not so much depends on the illustration of a political motive (i.e., pro-life, race, the environment, social change, etc.), but rather hinges on characterizing that motive as political; that is, as illegitimate, as foreign to ordinary politics, and, above all, as an existential threat to “our way of life” that must be anticipated and prevented. Thus, a shift in the crux of the definitional conundrum of terrorism—from searching for political motive to analyzing how actors are deemed a civilizational threat—reveals the close relationship between defining terrorism and identity constructs.

This chapter is structured around two definitional axes through which the three men were coded as terrorists. The first maps the manner in which the motives underlying the actions of McGowan, Page, and Hasan were demarcated as “foreign.” Efforts to do so begin with the discourse of the Double, if in varying ways, claiming that within the familiar—be they the white faces of environmentalists and racists or a US military uniform—lurks an otherness that threatens (Western) civilization. While each case presents distinct narrations of otherness, they are all accompanied by invocations of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other. Through comparison or superimposition, this figure renders the otherness of each legible vis-à-vis their familiarity.

The second is temporal. Time magazine asked, “Is Fort Hood an aberration or a sign of things to come?” hinting that an answer to the single-word question that masked Hasan’s visage depended on whether his act could be shown to be an incidence rather than a mere incident. In more general terms, if terrorism is part of a political project, it cannot, by definition, be a one-time act. Efforts to mark the men as terrorist involved tying McGowan, Page, and Hasan to past doppelgängers: Theodore Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Nawaf al-Hazmi (one of the 9/11 hijackers), respectively. It is a definitional maneuver that sets in motion a Janus-faced discourse that projects and mutates a traumatic past into an imminent, yet not entirely determined, future. The logic here is that of a future-past (futur antérieur), but one that maintains a sense a Derridian unknowable future (the “to come,” à-venir)—trauma, as Derrida states, proceeds from the future.3 Each man, as the manifestation of a copy, the fulfillment of the future as past in the present, creates a cyclical lineage that promises subsequent copies and returns, though in perhaps even more destructive form. Time suggests as much. “A sign of things to come?” The titular question, thus, concerns more than one’s status as a terrorist; an affirmative answer also includes the promise of things to come. It is a futurity “held in the present in a perpetual state of potential,” made legible through a doubling in time.4

The Double reveals the complex and mutable interplay of identity constructs integral to recoding violence as terrorism as well as the temporal structure on which this incorporeal transformation depends. The Double is, in effect, the operational figure of preemption, a risk too catastrophic (and rare) to be subject to calculation and compensation. The Double, as existential threat, thus requires, as sociologist François Ewald puts it, that I, “out of precaution, imagine [rather than calculate] the worst possible, the consequence that an infinitely deceptive, malicious demon could have slipped into the false of apparently innocent enterprise.”5 Shifting the definitional problem of terrorism to a focus on how a wide breadth of actors, actions, and utterances are coded as existential threats illustrates how the Double is not simply a source of anxiety or another adversary to be captured and confined. Rather, the Double is internal to preemptive politics. It is an adversary that cannot—or, pace security thinking, ought not—be named, only anticipated.

Coding Terror (in Three Parts): Identity at the End of Civilization

Human-Hating Treehuggers

The largest domestic terrorism investigation in US history, Operation Backfire, focused on a series of arsons.6 The operation hinged on the use of an informant, Jacob Ferguson, a one-time mainstay in the environmentalist movement in the US Northwest. Exploiting his heroin addiction, the FBI swayed him into service to avoid drug charges. For his handlers, Ferguson mapped out a cell of eighteen individuals with ties to a variety of groups known for taking “direct action”—i.e., arson, vandalism, sabotage, and demonstrations—against organizations whose activities harmed the environment and animal life. Referred to as “the Family,” the cell was characterized by critics as a fiction cooked up by the combined imaginations of overeager FBI agents and a strung-out informant. Ferguson was flown around the country to stage “run-ins” with each individual and record their conversations; Daniel McGowan was one of the individuals he visited.

After his arrest, McGowan agreed to a noncooperative plea bargain (in which he was not required to testify against his codefendants) and admitted to his involvement in two arsons in Oregon in 2001. The trial judge applied a terrorism enhancement at sentencing and McGowan received a seven-year term, double the average federal sentence for arson. McGowan served his time in a communication management unit housed at the US Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. It is a form of confinement developed specifically to house terrorists and one that severely limits one’s contact with the outside world. He was released on June 3, 2013.7 Throughout the process FBI officials unequivocally referred to McGowan and company as terrorists.

Ecoterrorism is not the conceptual offspring of 9/11. Ron Arnold, founder of the Wise-Use Movement, coined the term in a 1983 article for Reason magazine. His intent, on behalf of a consortium of industry interests, was to secure additional protections against (and vilify) environmentalists.8 The concept’s migration from the pages of industry pamphlets into mainstream political discourse was the result of intense industry lobbying. The campaign also worked to insert itself into academic debate; the first article about “environmental terrorism” to appear in the journal Terrorism was authored by an executive of Contingency Management Services.9 Within two decades ecoterrorism became the FBI’s top domestic terrorism priority. In 2003, the American Legislative Exchange Council published a pamphlet (amounting to model legislation) titled “Animal and Ecological Terrorism in America” in an effort to transform the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 into the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The latter was ultimately ratified in 2006, preceded by a series of Senate and House committee hearings on ecoterrorism.

The radical environmentalist movement that industry sought to vilify is made up of a variety of groups, organizations, and networks. A few of the more recognizable names, those implicated in Operation Backfire, include the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), and Earth First!10 ALF, ELF, and SHAC are British imports that arrived in the United States in 1979, 1996, and 2004, respectively. ALF announced its presence in the United States by freeing five animals from the New York University Medical Center.11 Earth First! was founded in 1979 by Dave Foreman, a popular figure in the environmentalist movement who penned Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching in 1985; his book details “ecotage,” tactics for sabotaging machinery in order to disrupt industry activities. The groups are tied together in a number of ways: tactics, philosophy, shared members, and declarations of solidarity—not to mention being the co-subjects of government hearings, investigations, and reports.

James Jarboe, the FBI’s domestic terrorism section chief, defines ecoterrorism as “the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target often of a symbolic nature.”12 As a carbon copy of the FBI definition of domestic terrorism, the terms “environmentally” and “environmental” are scribbled in, either attached to or in place of, “politically” and “political.” Republican Senator David Vitter, present at many of the hearings on the subject, lauded the application of terrorism to the actions of environmentalists. Echoing the testimonies of employees and executives who described the terror they felt as a result of direct action, he concluded, “I think it is absolutely appropriate. You look up the definition, and this is what terrorism is about. It is using violent and illegal activity to try to intimidate people, scare people into submission to go along with these extremist political agendas. That is basically the dictionary definition of terrorism.”13 Matters, however, were not so straightforward.

Despite causing approximately $110 million in damage in a suspected 1,100 cases, the actions of radical environmentalists have never resulted in a single death. The care taken by the movement’s organizations to not “harm any animal (human or otherwise)” led some within government and elsewhere to chastise those who would equate direct action with terrorism as engaging in “excessive name calling.”14 While I address the attempts to deflect charges of terrorism below, what is at issue here is the manner in which direct action and its practitioners were marked as terrorist in light of a lack of fatalities. Arguments that one ought not call another a terrorist if there is no trail of dead implies that the identification of a political motive alone is not sufficient for recoding violence as terrorism. How was this impasse circumvented? What provided proponents of the institutionalization of ecoterrorism with an avenue through which to authoritatively and legally (i.e., in legislation) code environmentalists as terrorists?

The first maneuver involves including violence to property in the definition of (eco)terrorism. The owner of Superior Lumber, the target of one of the arsons with which McGowan was involved, described the destruction of his property as producing a feeling of terror.15 Here, property is intimately tied to one’s body and livelihood, the destruction of which could have devastating impacts. In government hearings, acts of property destruction were regularly compared to murder.16

If not wholly convincing, the movement’s apparent disdain for private property acted as the basis from which arson and vandalism were delineated as fundamentally anti-Western acts, the motivation for which could only have a foreign or un-American source. In a statement to a House Subcommittee hearing on Ecoterrorism and Lawlessness in National Forests, one executive forcefully asserted that the environmentalist movement is

disdainful of fundamental American values, including the rule of law, private property rights, free enterprise, and democracy.… [They] detest American businesses, our free enterprise system, our environmental policies, our use of animals for food and medical research, our judicial system, our elected officials, and many other American institutions and values.17

Others emphasized that radical environmentalists are, in essence, “human-hating treehuggers” who renounce “the view of the Greek philosopher Protagoras that ‘man is the measure of all things.’ ” In effect, they want to “destroy civilization as we know it.”18

Certainly various segments of the environmentalist movement align themselves with “the East”—a largely reappropriated and mythologized notion of a space and culture untouched by technology, which, among other things, speaks to the whiteness of which the movement has repeatedly been accused.19 Various authors within the movement alternatively trace its roots to the Indian Vedas (1500 BC) that denounce the eating of meat, the Jains (circa 500 BC) who wore covers over their mouths so as to not accidentally swallow insects, and, later, Buddhists. Furthermore, they chastise the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in equal measure—for claiming that god gave man dominance over the earth, which they see as the root of “an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive [Capitalist] system.”20

Conversely, there is a contingent within the movement that aligns it with the very American philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They characterize environmentalist thought as the “most recent expressions of the centuries-old minority tradition in Western philosophy” that showcases and embodies the “highest ideals of Western society.”21 Others still connect their lived environment to US nationalism. In the 2011 documentary If a Tree Falls, which documents, in part, McGowan’s story, Bill Barton of the Native Forest Council stumbles upon a felled old-growth tree and longingly muses that it “probably sprouted just about the time Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

To counter the potential that Americans might identify with the movement or its goals, its opponents further characterize the movement as anti-Western by conjuring the brown-Arab-Muslim-other: “They think they are heroes and crusaders for justice, just as the September 11 hijackers thought of themselves in this way.” Moreover, radical environmentalists might prove even more dangerous. The movement’s action against Huntingdon Life Sciences, whose animal testing practices broke various protection laws, succeeded in having financiers divest from the company. In his testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the company’s counsel claimed that in “attacking the integrity and independence of the US stock market system … [SHAC] had succeeded where Osama bin Laden had failed.” In effect, within the familiar faces of these white Americans exists a “homegrown brand of al-Qaeda,” a threat so dangerous to American interests and values that only a racialized terrorist identity construct could communicate its gravity.22

The Sound of Hate

On the morning of August 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page entered the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek. He opened fire, killing six people. Another four were wounded before he turned his weapon on himself. One victim’s relative recounted the massacre:

It was not the American dream of Prakash Singh, who had only been reunited with his family for a few precious weeks after six years apart. When he heard gunshots that morning, he told his two children to hide in the basement. He saved their lives. When it was over, his children found him lying in a pool of blood. They shook his body and cried “Papa! Get up!” But he was gone.23

After the initial confusion, which included reports of multiple gunmen and that the police had shot Page, details began to emerge about the shooter. He was a US Army veteran whose tattoo-covered body read “like a poster text for white nationalism.”24 Page had been a member of a white power skinhead organization. The Hammerskins—which includes a (self-characterized) clandestine group of supporters called Crew 38—formed in Dallas, Texas, in 1988 and is an integral part of the white power music scene. Himself a guitarist and vocalist in a variety of “hatecore” bands (e.g., Celtic Warrior, Intimidation One, Aggressive Force, Blue Eyed Devils, and End Apathy), Page had been on the radar of various watchdog agencies for some time. The FBI announced early on that it was investigating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.25

The United States has an endemic history of both systemic racial oppression as well as hate- and bias-motivated crime that includes intimidation, assault, vandalism, arson, and murder. The racist right to which the Hammerskins are tied is made up of a diverse set of organizations and networks. Sociologists Pete Simi and Robert Futrell divide the movement along four branches—the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity and neo-Pagan racists, Neo-Nazis, and racist skinheads. While not without their disagreements, conflicts, and debates, these branches have migrated, mixed, and overlapped in a variety of ways. Before the end of the Cold War connections between groups began to solidify under the banner of RaHoWa (Racial Holy War), facilitating the movement of individuals and iconography between groups. For example, the contemporary KKK is involved in the racist music scene and has itself “Nazified” through the adoption of Neo-Nazi symbols. Also, in the mid- to late 1980s skinheads began to incorporate Nazi ideals and were themselves recruited into other groups. The Hammerskins are a part of this mixture. It is perhaps ironic that one of their founding members met Tom Metzger (founder of the White Aryan Resistance) during a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show (February 4, 1988), which led to increased connections between the groups as well as the more active presence of the Hammerskins in the white supremacist movement as a whole.26

The distinction between hate crimes and terrorism is difficult to ascertain. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, does not have a strict protocol regarding the distinct use of each term. Rather, it follows the FBI definition of “hate crime” and labels attacks it feels are politically motivated as terrorism on a case-by-case basis, admitting that there can be overlap.27 Perhaps the crucial difference is to be found in the communicative aspect of terrorism. That is, one might hypothetically murder someone of a particular race, for example, motivated by prejudices one personally holds, and perhaps without the intent of sending a message to a broader audience. However, this distinction is problematic. First, divorcing personal prejudice from broader political, social, and cultural contexts is difficult if not altogether questionable. Second, a message is likely conveyed beyond one’s victim regardless of one’s intent, be it to those targeted by violence or those who are like-minded, and this audience need not be national or international in scope.

Rather than attempting to resolve this tension, it is more useful to examine what the tension itself reveals about the definitional problem of terrorism. The lack of concrete distinction between hate crimes and terrorism, the fact that there is always a semblance of political motivation in hate crimes, further illustrates that identifying a political motive is not in itself satisfactory in recoding violence as terrorism. Again, we return to the existential, even if at first glance, situating Page therein poses a quandary. The prevalence and institutionalization of racist violence within the United States begs the question of how such actions could be recoded as threatening the very essence and structure of American society—save a disingenuous denial of white supremacy. By what means does the racist violence integral to the establishment of the United States return in the guise of a transformational threat?

The redefinition of white racist violence from a mainstay of American politics to terrorism occurs through a rereading of the racist right’s recent past. According to Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the contemporary racist right is far removed from the likes of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, which saw itself as a defender of culture and country. A decisive shift occurred at end of the Cold War: without the Communist bogeyman, the US government became the racist right’s foremost nemesis. They argue that, slowly ushered in and solidified through the Oklahoma City bombing, the racist right shifted from being a “restorationist effort” to constituting a “revolutionary movement” that pursues a fundamental transformation of the United States.28

Beirich and Potok released their report in 2009, the same year that a Department of Homeland Security report on the threat of right-wing extremism was decried as an attack on veterans and conservatism more generally. The backlash effectively gutted the branch of the department that dealt with right-wing extremism. I address this in detail below, but point now to how the aftermath of the Sikh temple shooting, and more recently the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in early 2016, resulted in a revived interest (however momentary) in the workings of the racist and extreme right and how a movement the DHS called “paranoid” continues to plot “against America.”29

By no means providing a characterization of the racist right that is universally accepted in the United States, Beirich and Potok attempt to solidify the transformation of racist violence into terrorism, to further position it as “foreign” so to speak. Their report does so through an indirect invocation of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other. The otherness of this figure is imbued into white racists by emphasizing statements of affinity made in the aftermath of 9/11:

In case after case, extremists applauded the murder of some 3,000 of their countrymen. Billy Roper, then an official of the major neo-Nazi group National Alliance, said it best in an email to all 1,400 of his members. “The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least, our friends,” he wrote. “We may not want them marrying our daughters, just as they would not want us marrying theirs. We may not want them in our societies, just as they would not want us in theirs. But anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is alright [sic] by me. I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude.”30

White supremacist web forums have featured, and not infrequently, discussions regarding whether or not Arabs are “white,” with a variety of opinions on the matter. More recently threads focused on Muslims dominate discussions therein of what constitutes an existential threat to white America. Regardless, it is through the suggested affinity quoted above that statements by the racist right, such as “that government [one led by Barack Obama] is not our government,” are given resonance as existential threats.31

The argument here is not that groups such as the SPLC are wrong in labeling racist violence as terrorism. Surely, in the current political climate, there is a strategic utility to marking violence as terrorism in order to garner needed attention. Nor is it to deny the immense terror inflicted by white supremacists (and this terror is too often denied). There are, however, serious limits to dealing with racism and racist violence in the United States through the lens of terrorism. Specifically, it begs the question as to whether conceptualizing the racist violence experienced by communities of color through a formulation of terrorism that effectively severs violence from its complex contexts—reducing the source of violence to “evil” or a “foreign” entity—can address the continued institutionalized character of that violence, particularly given the statist nature of present-day conceptualizations of terrorism (which I address below). Nevertheless, the immediate purpose here is to show the manner in which identity is deployed in efforts to communicate and redefine violence as terrorism. More than a political cause, it is violence with an aim to bring an end to society as we know it, a claim communicated through the figure of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other and the clash of civilizations baggage with which it comes, however seemingly questionable or counterintuitive the coupling might be.

The Horror at Fort Hood

On the afternoon of November 5, 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who had joined the military out of high school, entered the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, Texas. Wearing his military uniform and brandishing a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver, he opened fire. Unleashing over a hundred rounds, he killed thirteen and wounded thirty-two of his fellow servicemen and-women. In the melee, Hasan was shot several times and was paralyzed from the waist down. In August 2013 Hasan was convicted of thirteen counts of premeditated murder, dishonorably discharged, and sentenced to death. In the immediate aftermath, as rumors circulated about Hasan being troubled by his imminent deployment to Afghanistan, President Obama urged Americans to avoid making premature conclusions about the nature of the crime, for which he received much criticism.32 Despite the FBI’s conclusion that Hasan had no significant ties to terrorist groups, the shooting is widely referred to as an act of homegrown terrorism.

The DHS definition of homegrown terrorism places focus on those who work “in furtherance of political or social objectives promoted by a foreign terrorist organization, but [are] acting independently of direction by a foreign terrorist organization.” Thus, Hasan’s status as a “lone wolf” acting outside of official structures of command or control, that is, his lack of material ties did not preclude the application of the terror label. In lieu of these—and before it became public knowledge that Hasan had contacted Anwar al-Awlaki—identity markers were used to substantiate his ties, however nonmaterial, to a foreign interest. (The contents of those emails would become known only later; those and Hasan’s own later statements regarding his motive I address in the next section.)

Within hours of the shooting, media pundits, politicians, and readers were quick to jump on what was for them the neat realization of their racialized fears of terrorism. “I think the name Malik Nidal Hasan might give you a clue,” stated one New York Times reader referring to the debate about the nature of the incident.33 Others stressed Hasan’s “heritage” or “roots” (i.e., he was born to Palestinian parents) over his American birth. His faith, illustrated by his dress and beard (which was later forcibly shaved), was a key focal point of speculation.34 His search for and ultimate failure to find a “pious” wife rendered him a childless bachelor, which was in turn construed as a failure in fulfilling his religious duty. Implied here is that, emasculated in the eyes of his god, Hasan found another way to assert his masculinity and satisfy his religious obligations. Even his good deeds, such as forgiving his neighbors who often taunted him and vandalized his car, were taken as indicators of a dangerous piety. One reader put it most plainly, “He wasn’t connected with a ‘terrorist’ group! Actually, he was—it is called Islam.”35 All this was made even more troubling given that his parents were reported to be not particularly devout, signaling a purposeful move to the “other side” of the existential conflict in which America is embroiled.

Yet, for the Webster Commission, tasked with reviewing FBI procedure after the attack,

Nidal Malik Hasan’s transformation into a killer underscores the dilemma confronting the FBI. Hasan was a licensed psychiatrist and a U.S. Army Major with fifteen years of military service. He was a member of two professional communities—mental health and defense—whose missions include protection against violence. He worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other facilities in close and constant contact with other U.S. military personnel, including fellow psychiatrists. He was a religious person. He had no known foreign travel. Other than his eighteen communications with Anwar al-Aulaqi, he had no known contact and no known relationships with criminal elements, agents of foreign powers, or potential terrorists.36

In the cases of McGowan and Page, the brown-Arab-Muslim-other was invoked in order to communicate that within familiar visages exists a threat of such severity that it justifies the label of terrorism. The form that the discourse of the Double takes in the Hasan case presents the inverse: of the threatening other hiding in plain sight, disguised as it were in military fatigues. Reinforced by notions of Islam as an inherently political and violent system of beliefs and laws, doubt was placed on whether a Muslim could faithfully serve in the US military. “A Muslim American soldier kills American soldiers. I’m shocked. Shocked,” one reader wrote sarcastically, while another framed it in a matter-of-fact tone: “What a split identity_-[sic] Arab (Muslim) American soldier (combatant). Talk about a person in a job for which they were not suited.”37 For those on the conspiratorial right—pundits who believe that the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out with Saddam Hussein’s help, that Obama is secretly Muslim, and that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated all levels of the US government—it was clear that Hasan’s allegiances lay with sharia law, which dictated “that the faithful must engage in jihad.”38 Hasan’s refusal to shave his beard was, in effect, an indicator of his militancy, of his extremism, and of where he placed his loyalty. (And, surely, the insistence to forcibly shave it at trial was an impotent gesture of asserting control—that even the other must follow protocol.) The implication here being that admitting Muslims into the military provides lone wolves with sheep’s clothing. For many, Hasan’s identity was proof enough that “the western civilized countries of the world … [must take] realistic approaches to the condition of cancer, Muslimism, existing in the world.” Framed as a matter of “self preservation,” at stake is no less than the “future of the republic.”39

* * *

The coding of all three men as terrorists did not go uncontested. In the immediate aftermath of the Fort Hood shooting voices in the media and its readership avidly rejected the application of reductive stereotypes to Hasan. For instance, in response to the reader (quoted above) who suggested that Hasan’s name indicated that he was in fact a terrorist, another retorted, “Does the name Timothy McVeigh give you a clue? Or how about Theodore Kaczynski?” Still another reader pointed out the racialized character of terrorism discourse: “When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal.… But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad.”40 Here, Hasan’s “torn psyche” is attributable not to some inherent incompatibility between Islam and serving in the American military, but rather to the racism Hasan experienced while in the service. In efforts to vilify one’s enemy, epithets such as “camel jockey,” “haaji,” and “raghead” had become part of soldiers’ everyday lexicon. Because Hasan experienced this firsthand, some saw the incident as a tragedy remedied only by more inclusivity rather than as a betrayal that warranted a purge.

There were also questions of mental illness, in both the Fort Hood and Sikh temple attacks. In Page’s case, media reports pried into his economic and relationship woes (the latter framed differently than those of Hasan). In the years leading up to his violent attack, his home—already once refinanced—went into foreclosure. After a move to Milwaukee, his girlfriend broke off their relationship. Soon after, Page stopped showing up for work. In the same vein, his violent act was repeatedly and widely referred to as a case of mistaken identity (which, of course, insinuates that violence against Muslims is somehow more understandable). This led those within the white supremacist movement to reject Page as “sick” or an idiot on the fringe of the movement.41 A thread started the day of Page’s rampage on the white supremacist site Stormfront captured the movement’s sentiments:

Let me guess, the story will be that he went to a Sikh temple to get revenge for 9/11, thinking that it was a Mosque.

Just as I thought when I heard the news: some low IQ White who doesn’t know the difference between Sikhs and Muslims.42

Some members even suggested collecting money for the victims. The label that represented his band also distanced itself from Page. Claiming it strove to promote a positive image, it removed his band’s merchandise from its website because it did not want to profit from the tragedy (which suggests that it could readily have done so). Here, either explicitly or otherwise, Page was placed on the fringe, either mentally ill or deficient.

The morning after the Fort Hood shooting, the New York Times’ Bob Herbert penned an op-ed, “Stress Beyond Belief,” in which he argued that breakdowns like Hasan’s were a sign of an overstretched and overworked military, with some troops serving multiple tours and little being done to address the resulting psychological effects.43 Despite the fact that Hasan had not yet been deployed, it was thought that his imminent deployment terrified him, particularly after counseling so many others who returned with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other afflictions. Readers commented that Hasan’s break was a sign of the unsustainability of US neo-imperialism, a foreign policy structured around natural resources and the greed of the military-industrial complex. The racism Hasan experienced in the military also contributed to his deteriorated mental health. In response, the New York Times’ David Brooks claimed that arguments about mental health were driven by “political correctness” and prematurely ruled out the “possibility of evil.”44 One of Brooks’s readers reiterated his dismissal of any explanation for Hasan’s violence outside of the clash of civilizations narrative more succinctly: “Calling guys like Nidal Hasan ‘nuts’ is like calling a member of the Nazi party a nut—its simplistic and overlooks the actual problem which is Islamic political ideology.”45

The invocation of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other is evident not only in efforts to code actors as terrorists, or to reject other plausible explanations of violence, but also in attempts to deflect the application of the label of terrorism. This line of articulation is evident throughout the documentary If a Tree Falls. The film catches up with McGowan on the anniversary of 9/11, walking the streets of New York City:

Of course I am going to get off of house arrest on this day, of all days, it’ll be today, you know? It’s really sad for me to have all these feelings about my home being attacked, my city being attacked. I mean, when I tell people that I’m accused of being a terrorist, whether it’s “eco” or “domestic” in front of it or if it’s just straight terrorist, it’s ludicrous to me, it’s surreal and, most people that know me are, like, “what?” No one’s accused in my case of flying planes, bombing things, trying to hurt people, none of these things, no one’s accused of that.

Earlier in the film, McGowan refers to terrorism as a “bogeyman word” that is applied to those with whom one disagrees. Yet, in the passage above he reverts to a seemingly obvious distinction, one predicated on unspoken cultural and racial stereotypes. A New York Times reader echoed this sentiment by stating that “labeling of ecologically motivated monkey-wrenchers as ‘terrorists’ … is disrespectful to the memories of those who perished at the hands of real terrorists on Sept. 11.”46 While McGowan and company at times invoke right-wing extremists as terrorists, often the “real terrorist” is embodied in a racial/ethnic/religious/cultural other. Either way, the argument is that to put radical environmentalists in the same “category as Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh … weakens the word terrorist.”47