Family members listen to music during a vigil for US Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21, who was killed in the Fort Hood massacre.

Debra Saunders in her nationally syndicated column this morning:

His own words as he opened fire – “Allahu Akbar” – and perhaps his online screeds show who he was. He acted not as a stressed-out shrink, but a violent and twisted extremist.

David Brooks in the New York Times this morning:

… evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

Both conservative columnists write against what they see as a failure of media nerve and even of national courage to call this man a terrorist. Brooks says, “There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.” Saunders:

It’s astonishing how people have used their political beliefs to recast this murderous rampage to reflect their politics. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, for example, wrote a column Saturday that focused on the post traumatic stress disorder suffered by troops who have served three or four tours of duty – unbothered by the fact that Hasan never served in a war zone.

Both understand that this — in their view — weak-kneed liberal attempt to avoid the facts is well intentioned: done in order to dissuade Americans from blaming all Muslims for this act. But they find it patronizing towards the American public. Brooks: “If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.” Saunders: “Most Americans are not stupid – they can process that information with the clear understanding that Hasan does not represent your average Muslim or your average Muslim serving in the U.S. military.”

This is how conservative commentators speak to liberal readers: these two write for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. So you can imagine what conservatives are saying to their own. For many Americans egged on by talk radio the suspicion will indeed descend on all Muslims. As our friend Wajahat Ali wrote four days ago:

If it is discovered that this lethal rampage was motivated by an inexcusable and misplaced sense of religiosity, it would provide ammunition to those extreme rightwing, minority voices in America who are convinced their Muslim neighbours are stealth jihadists ready to commit suicide bombings at a moment’s notice. These proponents of modern day McCarthyism find their allies in members of the “Birther movement”, who remain convinced President Obama is not an American citizen. Their esteemed colleagues include those who pontificate about Obama being a closet Muslim and an agent of socialism.

And Brooks doesn’t help by opening his column with general points about how we all shape narratives to explain our lives and our world, and most of us choose “stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But,” he then goes on to say “over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.” Guess which one he is referring to. Not the extremist American conservative one, even though he later says that “the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy.” No, he selects out the extremist Islamic narrative as the malevolent one. Not neo-con fantasies about American empire, Christian Right fantasies about Armageddon in the Middle East and the hell-bound destiny of all nonbelievers, or birther fantasies about killing our President.

So how should liberals in fact see Major Hassan? Are we all jumping to say he was simply a sick loner out of our fear and contempt for our fellow Americans who we imagine are prey to rightwing talk radio?

No spiritual progressive is unaware of the extreme danger of exclusivist religious ideas that portray the world as a cosmic battle between good and evil, correct believers and incorrect ones. We understand that personal and collective stories of immense pain make any and all of us vulnerable to cultural stories that demonize the other and blame them for our misery. We just don’t see this danger of demonization as a mainly Islamic one. It’s also homegrown, and it takes various forms, religious and political.

If you want an absolutely beautiful expression of this from the point of view of someone who has wrestled with her own exclusivist narrative and learned to amend it, read Kim Chernin’s “The Long Path Out of Denial: Zionism, Heartache, and a New Vision of Israel and Palestine” in the current Tikkun (available in bookstores or here, and excerpted from her new book here). Our Phone Forum discussion with Kim last night will go up soon on our website. Chernin brings the discussion back from the extreme examples, the killers, to ourselves, and our deep, deep difficulty with hearing the narratives of others’ pain that we do not want to hear.

Given that in all of our lives personal pain intersects with cultural narratives, then it is surely no surprise that for the killers it’s rarely ever a simple question of either a sick individual or a follower of extremist ideas. Timothy McVeigh was surely both when he bombed the Oklahoma Federal Building. To mention his personal pain is not to excuse him, but should give pause to all those who demonize others. Even male serial killers of women are acting out in extreme form the contempt that so much of patriarchal culture expresses for women. Contempt has consequences.

We can all feel Major Hasan’s pain: that of a man about to be sent to support a war he hates. Read Pat Barker’s classic novels about the psychiatrists who patched up the casualties of World War I, whose success meant the men would be fit to return to be cannon fodder in the trenches: who was mad there? There is a peculiar craziness to psychiatrists supporting unjust wars.

So to understand his pain is to say: Hasan, there are long traditions of peaceful protest from within the military; better to go to jail than to kill; join the soldiers against the war; join the devout American Muslims who are working to end these wars; find comradeship with others who understand and are working day and night to end war; and did you not understand the many advocations to peace in the Qu’ran? But he did not hear, perhaps because our voices were not loud enough, or because he was in too much pain.

So we mourn for the people he killed.

As we mourn the many tens of thousands killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars that our government chose to pursue, due to personal failures of our leaders and cultural narratives of domination and contempt that they were following and that, indeed,  got them re-elected.

And we resist the temptation, offered us in its most reasonable form by David Brooks, to say that it is the narrative of extremist Islam that is peculiarly malevolent. It is indeed malevolent, but so are the ideas that are driving our wars and driving many more than one soldier to despair, suicide, addiction and killing.

And we resist the temptation to imagine that Hasan was only a sick loner, and that his outburst had nothing to do with extremist rightwing religion.

This is all too obvious to say. But reading those two columns this morning I felt someone on Tikkun Daily had to say it.