Feminist Looking Glass

I have never blogged about .  The Ft. Hood shootings were so tragic and it was, of course, being covered by all the news media.  However, as I write below, there is one failure of the news media that has continued to bother me.

Immediately after it became known that Hasan was a Muslim, there was fear among other Muslims that the shootings would be used to increase the ant-Muslim discrimination in this country.  (For instance, see this Christian Science Monitory article of November 22 about some of the steps taken by the Muslim community so they would not “feel new heat.”  )  That was similar to what happened immediately after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, when the Korean-American community rightly was concerned that the actions of one Korean-American would be used to generalize negative feelings to all Korean-Americans.   It became worse for Muslims when the media began to report about Hasan’s religion and his “radicalization.”

But, probably especially because of the large amount of coverage of Hasan’s religion and “radicalization,” it has continued to bother me that there has been almost a complete lack of coverage by the media (other than immediately after the shootings) about the U.S. soldier who had harassed Hasan because of his religion during the weeks and months before the shootings.

The AP reported the following on November 6, one day after the shootings.   Hasan lived in a small apartment complex.  He filed a report with Killeen police on August 16 that said that Hasan’s car, while in the apartment complex, had been “keyed” and had suffered an estimated $1,000 damage.  The manager of the complex said that the person who did the keying was a U.S. soldier named John Van de Walker and that Van de Walker had also removed and tore up a bumper sticker that read “Allah is Love.”  The apartment manager said that “Van de Walker had been in Iraq and was upset to learn that Hasan was Muslim.”

The apartment owner believed that Van de Walker was responsible and evicted him.  Police arrested Van de Walker on October 21 and charged him with criminal mischief.  He was discharged from the Army on October 21, the same day he was arrested.  The media were not able to reach Van de Walker in the days after the shootings, but his mother said that Van de Walker suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and that he had accused Hasan of harassment because “[Hasan] got into John’s face and said that Islam is the answer and that Christians suck.”

So here we have a blatant act of discrimination by Van de Walker that occurred in August and resulted in the arrest of Walker On October 21, 15 days before the shooting.  And yet there was almost no news coverage of it.

I did a simple google news search for “John Van de Walker.”  As far as I can tell, there were a very few news articles (like the ones above) a day or two after the shootings.  (See also this CNN article on November 7 and this from Yahoo News India on November 9.)  The last article I saw was on  November 13 that added that Van de Walker had apologized to Hasan (which I imagine led to Hasan saying (see below) that he forgave Van de Walker) and that the police had not charged Van de Walker with a hate crime.  But that is all of the coverage I could find.

It is, of course, likely that the incidents with Van de Walker had little or nothing to do with Hasan’s mind set at the time of the shootings.  In fact, another apartment complex resident said that she had spoken with Hasan about the keying of his car and that “Hasan didn’t seem too upset that his vehicle was scratched.  ‘He said it was Ramadan and that he had to forgive people. . . He forgave him and moved on.”

But with all of the investigation done by the media, you have to wonder why the possible impact of the incidents with Van de Walker were not written about.  At the very least, if there was media coverage of Van de Walker’s blatant bigotry, it could have drawn some attention to the fact that acts of bigotry can have consequences not just to the person who is discriminated against, but to many others.  In addition, it could have again pointed out that the military has not done a good enough job of caring for returning soldiers and, in particular in this case, of trying to decrease discrimination against Muslims by returning soldiers.

Filed under: Harassment, Violence, Workplace Tagged: | Fort Hood, John Van de Walker, Nidal Malik Hasan