In the New York Times, columnist David Brooks points to a “national rush to therapy” in explaining the recent shooting spree by Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood. In the interest of political correctness, he claims, people resisted the mounting evidence that Hasan was in fact a zealot motivated by a deadly religious narrative:
So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.
Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.
“It denied,” concludes Brooks, “the possibility of evil.”