Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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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