COLUMN: Double standards and Fort Hood shooting

It’s a shock when I find insight in a right-wing letter to the Daily News, but sometimes it happens.
A Nov. 8 writer responded to the Fort Hood shooting by pointing out that “we have chosen to allow persons with suspect heritage, race, religion and national origin to advance to all levels of leadership in this country.”
As soon as I read it, I realized he was right: Our national government and military leadership is overflowing with white Americans.
The same race as the Columbine killers. The same race as Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, as anti-abortion terrorists Scott Roeder, Eric Rudolph and Paul Hill, as the KKK and the white supremacist movement. They’re the overwhelming majority of Congress, staff the executive branch, dominate the Supreme Court — why, even our president is half white!
I’m afraid!
Yes, I’m joking. Unfortunately the letter writer wasn’t and neither are vast number of far more prominent right-wing voices.
Pat Robertson, for example, has announced that American Muslims should be treated “as we would members of a fascist group.” Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association says Muslims should be banned from the military until they can prove they’re not terrorists: “You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk.”
Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade suggests that all Muslim soldiers have “special debriefings” because “if  I’m going to be sitting in an outpost, I’ve got to know that the guy next to me is not going to want to kill me.” On the National Review Web site, pundit Mark Steyn wrote that the shooter’s “Islamic impulses” overcame “his entire American identity.”
Don’t get me wrong, if Major Nidal Hassan was acting as a terrorist, it’s important to figure out why he wasn’t red-flagged as a threat earlier. But it’s a rather large jump from that to treating all Muslims in the military as potential murderers; the vast majority serve honorably and some (as Bush speech-writer David Frum has pointed out) have died for this country.
And if Hassan didn’t belong to an unpopular religious minority, you wouldn’t hear so many prominent mainstream voices suggesting otherwise.
The right wing took plenty of criticism after Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack on the Murrah Building, but nobody in the mainstream suggested all right-wingers should be banned from serving; even Homeland Security’s report on the potential for veterans becoming terrorists produced shrieks of outrage from the right.
Likewise, while Jim Adkisson’s murderous 2008 attack on a Unitarian church (to kill liberals, by his own statement) led to warnings about the potential for right-wing violence, nobody as prominent as Robinson or Kilmeade suggested that all right-wingers were potential killers (even most left-wing blogs didn’t go that far).
Kilmeade’s remark about worrying someone in your platoon wants to kill you could easily apply to a non-white soldier sharing a foxhole with a neo-Nazi (and we have a number of them serving in the military) but I haven’t heard that point made on TV either.
No surprise. Most of us look at whites and Christians and see individuals: The existence of white supremacists isn’t taken as proof about the essential nature of all white people. Because Muslims are a minority, however, it’s easy for anyone predisposed to bigotry to see Hassan as the face of all Muslims. If one Muslim is a terrorist, all of them should be treated as potential terrorists.
They’re not.
The vast majority of American Muslims are peaceful, respectable citizens, much like Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Wiccans and atheists.
When they’re not, they should be dealt with the same as we’d dealt with Rudolph, the Unabomber or McVeigh: As an individual, not as a spokesman for a group some of us desperately want excuses to hate.