I wasn’t sure I’d be posting about last week’s Fort Hood incident, but here I am. After helping guide my network’s coverage last week as it happened, I took a break over the weekend and paid no attention to it. But coming back to the newsroom on a Monday, I found that my worst fears about this thing were coming true: We’re all about the scary scary Muslims and how they’re even infiltrating our glorious military.

Not that any homegrown right wing militants would do that. Matt Kennard at Salon:

The lax regulations have also opened the military’s doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and gang members — with drastic consequences. Some neo-Nazis have been charged with crimes inside the military, and others have been linked to recruitment efforts for the white right. A recent Department of Homeland Security report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” stated: “The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.” Many white supremacists join the Army to secure training for, as they see it, a future domestic race war. Others claim to be shooting Iraqis not to pursue the military’s strategic goals but because killing “hajjis” is their duty as white militants.

Soldiers’ associations with extremist groups, and their racist actions, contravene a host of military statutes instituted in the past three decades. But during the “war on terror,” U.S. armed forces have turned a blind eye on their own regulations. A 2005 Department of Defense report states, “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt … they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.”

Tim McVeigh, you may recall, was a Gulf War I veteran who was awarded a bronze star before he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, the deadliest terror attack in the United States prior to 9/11. Unless you want to count all the federal government-sanctioned native American massacres of the 19th century.

And yet I just heard a local radio DJ dismiss McVeigh in a discussion of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as some kind of one-off event. As if David Atkisson didn’t go shooting at a Unitarian Church or Scott Roeder didn’t kill Dr. George Tiller.

“Not all Muslims are terrorists,” he said, “but all terrorists are Muslims.”

Guess he’s never heard of the Continuity IRA or ETA or Aum Shinrikyo or the Communist Party of the Philippines or Kahane Chai (Israel) or the National Liberation Army (Colombia) or the Real IRA or the Revolutionary Nuclei (Greece) or the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (Greece) or the Shining Path (Peru) or the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, all on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations and none of them Muslim.

No, better to just remain Ameri-centric and claim that only the terrorists who have attacked U.S. interests are real terrorists, and only if they’re not white Christians. And just how many out of more than a billion and a half Muslims in the world are terrorists anyway?

I can’t remember where I read this — and I hope it wasn’t my network’s Web site — but I read a story about a mother who was watching after her wounded son who was being treated for PTSD by Maj. Hasan. He scared her, she said, because he had evil in his eyes and said he thought all the troops should come home.

And because his name was Nidal Malik Hasan, I suspect. My own dark brown black Irish eyes aren’t too dissimilar to Hasan’s, and I think the troops should all come home too. Am I evil and scary? Well, some would say yes, but I don’t have an Arabic name, so I’m probably safe. Unless you believe, like Glenn Beck and his followers, that liberals who want to see the war end and our troops safely back home are at the very least in league with the terrorists. The Muslim terrorists.

Wonder if Scott Roeder thought about shouting “God is great” as he murdered George Tiller?

On Friday, a day after the Fort Hood shooting, CNN’s Anderson Cooper ran an in depth report on an American Muslim in New York who encourages attacks on Americans. Good timing there, CNN. Nothing like a little fearmongering in the middle of a powder keg.

Muslims in this country already feel marginalized and isolated from the rest of the population. They already fear harassment, intimidation and even violence because of the incredible xenophobia and racism that this country allows to run unchecked. Why else would Islamic organizations here prepare press releases condemning the shooting before they knew the name of the suspect, just in case that name turned out to be Arabic?

Conservative racists condemned CNN today for airing an interview with a soldier who said he heard Hasan shout “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) before he started shooting and then downplayed it. Of course, that couldn’t have been because the soldier said he thought Hasan said something in Arabic and he thought it might have been Allahu akbar, but he really wasn’t sure.

Last week, the “how did he get promoted and why wasn’t anybody watching him” crap began. There were reports that he had bad performance reviews. But the FBI said Monday that he had good performance reviews.

The FBI also said he hit their radar last year when they intercepted some communications from him while wiretapping someone in Yemen. But they determined he wasn’t a threat — didn’t say anything about attacking anybody or anything like that, so they stopped watching him in December. I should note here that that would have been the Bush administration’s watch, since I’m sure the right wing lunatics will do their best to blame this on the secret Kenyan Muslim we have as president.

Then there was the doctor last week who said no way a psychiatrist would have snapped after spending years listening to fellow soldiers describing horrendous experiences in war. Of course not. No more than journalists who cover disasters and other tragedies are ever affected by what they hear.

And all the while my beloved colleagues are digging up every little thing they can in their misguided attempts to prove Nidal Hasan was a Muslim extremist.

OMG he attended counterterrorism lectures! OMG he went to a mosque where a radical Muslim was once imam! OMG the communications, the wiretaps found were with that very imam!

Never mind, of course, that the very investigators who listened to those wiretaps said they saw no evidence he was part of any plot. In fact, all the evidence so far point to Hasan being a lone wolf sort of guy, who did what he did for his own reasons.

Kinda like Tim McVeigh, except Tim McVeigh actually had connections with right wing militants in this country. And David Atkisson was an avid Glenn Beck fan and Scott Roeder hung out with Randall Terry types. Terry, you may recall, commended Roeder for killing the baby killer.

The military is playing this right — they aren’t releasing information about their investigation because they don’t want to inflame an already rabid American right wing. But that hasn’t stopped the speculators from speculating and drawing the worst possible conclusions out of every little thing they hear, be it rumor or fact.

I’m ashamed of my colleagues today. When they should be fact-finding, they’re instead rumor-mongering. When they should be mindful of the incendiary atmosphere, they’re instead pouring gasoline on the flames.

But then, they have yet to admit that we have a right wing problem in this country, and until they do, we’re in for a rocky ride. Ask Rev. Alexios Marakis, a Greek Orthodox priest lost in Tampa who approached a Marine reservist on Monday to ask directions, only to be beaten with a tire iron and chased several blocks. Lance Cpl Jason Bruce told police Marakis was a terrorist who had shouted “Allahu akbar,” that the priest had tried to rob him and finally that he had sexually assaulted him. Wonder which one was true?

I’m not saying the Fort Hood shooter isn’t a terrorist, mind you. I’m saying he’s just as much of a terrorist as Atkisson and Roeder. And McVeigh. Not that anybody to the right of Barack Obama will acknowledge that, and he we all know he won’t either.

Wonder how Joe Lieberman’s hearing on Scary Muslims in the U.S. Military will turn out?

I’ll tell you what’s scary these days. Being Muslim in America.