National Public Radio this morning had a report that included interviews with doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday’s Fort Hood massacre. That report came before employees at WR were put on lock down as far as talking to anyone, including the press, and, according to NPR, the FBI.

I can’t find the report on their Web site, although this story mentions briefly how Hasan was reprimanded for proselytizing about Islam when he was in training at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Even though I’m lacking evidence that what I heard in the car this morning wasn’t a product of my imagination, I’m sticking my neck out with a big question: Why didn’t the folks at Walter Reed report this guy as crazy if what they recall happening indeed did happen?

I think it is because there is a fine line between racial/ethnic/religious profiling and pointing out the obvious and people are really afraid of crossing over to the wrong side. Since 9/11 people have been afraid of appearing racist where Muslims are concerned. There’s good reason for that, such as the case of the flying imams.

So, instead of appearing intolerant, people stay quiet, even – sometimes especially – other Muslims. They don’t want to be judged by their religion so they are reluctant to judge others by that rubric, even when they know that the person they are dealing with is dangerous.

A few months after 9/11, I was working on an analysis piece for the Texas Catholic, and I interviewed a Dallas imam about this very thing. I asked him why imams would keep quiet if they knew someone nefarious was in their congregations. He said that if a dangerous Muslim was at a mosque, the best thing was to hope that he – in hearing the moderate, educated teaching preached at the majority of American mosques – would either change his stripes or, “in most cases, we just hope he leaves.” The community wants the crazy guy out of their religious space because, the imam said, lunatics are just as likely to kill other Muslims as anyone else.

In other words, moderate Muslims are trying to protect themselves as much as the rest of us, but in so doing – in not directly going after the crazies among them – they are putting others at risk. Ditto for your average citizen, or the doctors who knew Hasan. Who wants to be called intolerant or a racist? According to the NPR story, Hasan was cold, horrible with patients and fanatical about his religion. Doctors would talk about him in the hallway, the report said, asking themselves if he could be a terrorist or if he was just a really bad doctor.

Who knows if that is what drew him to kill people at Fort Hood? We won’t know until the investigation is complete, or until he talks. (And once he gets a lawyer, fat chance of him talking). But what we do know is that he was not a very warm, caring doctor – even by military standards – and people noticed that early on. They noticed that he seemed more concerned with his religion than his schooling and treatment of soldiers. They noticed that he used  medical lecture slot to preach the Quran. And yet he continued at the medical school, worked at the hospital, moved on like low-achieving students who are socially promoted because the grade they are leaving just wants them out of their hair.

What happened at Fort Hood shows that common sense really needs a shot in the arm. We don’t necessarily have to go all Hannity on folks, but we need to stop being so afraid of speaking up when craziness is staring us in the face.

Here are two more example people could use to condemn religion or write it off as just a bunch of crazy people: Rampaging Muslims killed eight Christians in Pakistan this weekend after rumor spread that somewhere in a village

The Quran, Islam's Holy text

a Quran had been defaced; and Dale Neumann admitted to a jury that, while his daughter lay dying, he prayed instead of calling 911 or rushing the 11-year-old to the hospital.

Let’s start with the first one. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you can’t convince people your religion is based on peace if everytime someone offends you, you resort to violence. Yes, the rioting Muslims – 20,000 at last estimate – might be non representative of Islam. If so, let’s hear that proclaimed loud and clear – and not in polite policy statements, but from the mosques where these Muslims attend services. That’s what is lacking in every condemnation from Muslim leaders against terrorism – it doesn’t come from the mosques. Bibles and other religious icons of Judaism and Christianity are defaced frequently. People burn Bibles, gangsters co-opt rosaries as neckwear, and weirdo artists make a chocolate Jesus. Those actions will elicit a letter from the Pope or a condemnation from Israel or a petition started by believers in a certain part of the country. They use their words to express their outrage or offense – not their fists. Muslims seriously need to get a clue on this.

Likewise, Christians who believe in God but somehow don’t believe God gave people medicine or doctors, need to get a clue – and perhaps some jail time and psychiatric care. I come from Texas; I’ve been plenty exposed to people who claim direct communication with the Almighty. I’ve also seen, from people who would never bring attention to themselves or stand up on a stage screaming that God will heal your lame leg, actual physical healing in response to prayer. So it isn’t that I doubt there is sometimes healing that can’t be explained by medicine or science. But it is rare, and it is unpredictable. Medicine, too, can be unpredictable, and the cure is sometimes worse than the symptoms of the disease – just ask anyone who’s endured chemotherapy. But medicine has a far better track record of healing than prayer, and believing so does not mean you’ve turned your back on God, as Neumann seemed to think.

When I first heard yesterday that Jewish rabbis were involved in a New Jersey corruption sting, my thoughts went out to the folks in their congregations because I remember the guilt-by-association feeling Catholics had when the clergy sex scandal broke. I found myself explaining – over and over again, amen – why I stayed Catholic and how just because .01 percent of priests were criminals did not mean all priests are awful. I watched as people wrapped a protective arm around children as they left Mass, passing by priests they’d known for years, and saw priests actually throw their hands up in a “I didn’t touch him” posture when little children ran up after services for a hug. The crisis caused a fissure in trust that has still not healed.

So, I wonder how Jews feel about five rabbis being arrested for money laundering in one of the biggest FBI stings ever. There is nothing like being betrayed by your religious leader, except, maybe, being betrayed by a parent. We hold religious leaders to a higher standard, as we darn-well should. They claim close relationship with the Almighty, they preach to those they lead about morality and ethics, they challenge those in their congregations to do good. In fact, Jews are admonished to practice the sacred duty of Tikkun Olam, which means “to heal the world.”

So how does laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars through Jewish charities in Israel translate into healing the world? And how does the Jewish community deal with the humiliation and shock? According to the Jerusalem Post, which did a great job of reporting the story, people were praying in Deal Synagogue in Long Branch, N.J., when the FBI stormed in to arrest their rabbi, Edmond Nahum. Spiritual leaders often tell worshipers to be open to surprises during prayer, but I’m pretty sure the arrest of your rabbi ain’t what they’re talking about.

The other thing that stands out in this is that these weren’t young rabbis – these were guys who should have known better. The youngest was 56, the oldest 87 (!!!!). (Then again, if we use age as a guide for acquired wisdom, Bernie Madoff should have known better, too. )

So, I ask – if you’re Jewish, how does this story make you feel? Do you think that religious leaders should be help to higher standards? Do you think the arrest of rabbis in a financial scandal will fuel racist thoughts about Jews and money? Discuss among yourselves – and in the comments below~

On our 25th wedding anniversary, I gave my husband a typical journalist gift: a puzzle of the New York Times font page from the day of our wedding. (We missed the paper that day.) It took us forever to piece it together because it was tiny black and white type and two large gray-scale photos. But as we soldiered on, we read the stories, and one stood out: A report from the Middle East about Israel and Palestine. Reading through it, we couldn’t help but grieve that these two peoples have been fighting for so long because neither can fully accept the other’s right to land.

The conflict is complicated and too much for this post, but the major sticking points all go to one thing: Both peoples have memories that go back thousands of years and they both refuse to forgive. A conversation I had with an Israeli media ambassador during a trip there nearly 10 years ago still rings in my mind. I had asked why the Israelis and Palestinians didn’t just share Jerusalem as a capital, and why Israel couldn’t recede back to its original boundaries. Live and let live, I said. The man’s answer? “You Americans and your 200-year-old country. You wake up in a world each day where you thrive on starting over, starting fresh. It is not that way here – we have HISTORY.”

The man may not have been a radical. But he, like many Israeli’s and Palestinians was willing to sacrifice peace for principle: This is my land. They took my mother’s house. I was here first. We won the war fair and square. Yada, yada, yada on into blindness and turmoil.

I will agree that, as the popular saying goes, that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Actually, I would ammend that to “the splintered, bickering Palestinian leadership” never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But the Israeli leadership isn’t much better. Case in point? Settlements in the occupied West Bank.

These outposts, supported by special “Jews-only” roads and water pipes that hijack a water supply from Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank, violate the Geneva Conventions prohibiting an occupying power from settling its own civilians on militarily controlled land, according to this incisive and personal look in Time Magazine. Barack Obama and just about every other world leader – not to mention the non-Jewish religious ones – want the settlements gone. Israel did rid Gaza of settlements, but it is limp-wristed when it comes to really getting them out of the West Bank. The military will fight off outlier settlements on the one hand while providing protection to the more suburban ones just a few minutes drive from Jerusalem.

The Time story tells of the Katz family, saying at one point, that even if the Israeli leadership would dismantle the settlements – or at least forbid expansion – people like the Katz’s would get in its way. And that’s because of Bad Religion (the theological concept, not the band.) Like radical Muslims who believe that the Prophet Muhammad called them to create a world in which Islamic law is the rule of the land, Jewish settlers believe they have a God-given mandate to settle the entire Holy Land because that is one of the preconditions for the Messiah’s arrival. Ironically, these folks are morally and financially supported by apocalypse-minded Christians who believe the Second Coming is predicated on the Holy Land being returned in complete to the Jews.

I wonder if any of these fringe groups has thought that the God they say created the world, a God of love and goodness and double-rainbows in monsoons, might actually prefer if they saved the earth he/she created instead of destroying it with bombs and belief systems producing all manner of un-godly behaviors.

(And to preempt the commenters who might say that Israel has the right to protect itself: Absolutely. However, give this some thought — Israel militarily occupies land that does not belong to it out of a perceived need for “safety.” They allow settlements in Arab land that they know really upset the average Palestinian, feeding an undercurrent of resentment that eventually boils over into hatred and violence. Instead of just getting rid of the settlements and arresting settlers, Israel drags its feet. Why? Could it be that Israel NEEDS to keep a certain level of irritation going on to make sure some violence occurs so Israel can always and forever claim, “We are under attack, support us.”  (Just sayin’.)

James Kirchick has an impassioned and interesting argument about why the religious right can’t be blamed for the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller. Impassioned because Kirchick appears exhausted by the comparison of fundamentalist Christians to Islamic militants, and interesting because Kirchick supports gay rights, abortion that is “safe, legal and rare,” and isn’t a member of the Religious Right.

Kirchick calls out liberals on any number of statements, including editorial writers who argue that anyone who called Tiller a murderer was an accomplice to his death, but especially focuses on the too-easy (and completely specious) canard that fundamentalist Christians are equal to Islamic jihadists. Not only that, his writing is poetic and well-reasoned:

“I hold no brief for the religious right, and its views on homosexuality in particular offend (and affect) me personally. But it’s precisely because of my identity that I consider comparisons between so-called Christianists (who seek to limit my rights via the ballot box) and Islamic fundamentalists (who seek to limit my rights via decapitation) to be fatuous.”

See the whole piece here, and have your mind stretched a little. And pray for the families of the Air France crash.

George Tiller, one of a handful of U.S. doctors known for performing third trimester abortions, was shot down yesterday in cold blood and bright sunlight as he was handing out church bulletins to parishioners at Wichita’s Reformation Lutheran Church. The Kansas City Star is reporting this morning that Scott P. Roeder, 51, was arrested yesterday afternoon and is expected to be charged with the murder sometime today.

Tiller’s murder is both crime and, from a religious standpoint, sin. There is no justifying it, and the anti-abortion-rights movement will pay dearly for the fanatics among their midst who chose to use violent means to their ends. Under our current laws, the termination of human life that has yet to live outside the womb is not a crime, so Tiller was not committing a crime, and even if he was, a country of laws does not allow vigilantes. (Except down at the border.) But does the legality of Tiller’s work make it any less an indictment of a society that appears to prize reproductive convenience over all other choices? (Abstinence, consciously used birth control, self-control, adoption…) That’s fodder for another post.

Surprisingly, there isn’t the flood of vitriolic commentary about Tiller’s death on anti-abortion-rights blogs that I expected. But an interesting commentary in the pro-abortion-rights camp is over at Religion Dispatches, where Frances Kissling posted the statement that the world’s religion do not consider abortion murder. I asked her about her source for that statement in the comments section, and she replied here (scroll down to the second comment in the link) with a good description of the theological (not the moral) stance of various religions where abortion is concerned.

While Kissling is theologically correct, it all still seems to be a little bit about semantics. The legal definition of murder is killing a human being with premeditation and forethought. Abortion is done with both premeditation and forethought, and when done in the third trimester, kills viable unborn children. Since abortion is legal, does that mean our legal system, at this time, views viable unborn children as something other than human beings? (Martians perhaps? Monkeys? Stuffed animals?) If so, then how does one explain the cases where people are charged with murder in the death of unborn children when killing pregnant women, such as here and here?

This, dear readers, is why the pro-con argument around abortion is complicated and grows ever more so each day. There are no easy answers in a world of gray.

Not that I’m bitter or anything … not that I’m not the teenyist bit frustrated with the “you may not get your severance upon layoff” message we’ve been getting …. but, it is a bit irritating to read, as though I should feel sorry for the guys, that the CEOs of my newspaper’s parent company are (sniff) having to cut their bonuses by 60 percent. Apparently, they’ll only get about $3.1 million in bonuses this year.

Is it wrong to make so much money – is it immoral? Sinful? I’m not sure. But in this economy, with millions laid off, I think it is, at least, tasteless. Shame on them for taking any bonus when they are continually asking their papers to lay people off or force furloughs. Maybe they wouldn’t be losing money if they weren’t paying such outrageous salaries. Just a thought.