Muslim groups decry Texas shooting

Washington: Muslims in North Texas and elsewhere in the US have called for calm as Islamic groups braced themselves for a public backlash against the faith in the aftermath of the deadly shooting that left 12 people dead at a US military facility on Thursday.

Soon after Pentagon officials named the shooter at the Fort Hood facility as Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, groups rallied to condemn an act President Barack Obama had earlier described as a "horrific outburst of violence."
 
"The guy’s name is a Muslim name,” Ebrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said, expressing fears about damage to inter-faith relations, already strained by the September 11, 2001 attacks, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a statement, CAIR condemned the shootings as a "cowardly attack" adding that "no political or religious ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence.

“American Muslims stand with our fellow citizens in offering both prayers for the victims and sincere condolences to the families of those killed or injured.”

“I am so sad,” Nia McKay, the Indonesian-born president of Peacemakers, a Dallas-based nonprofit dedicated to events centered on peace, told Dallas Morning News.

“Islam means Salaam. Its root word means peace. There are nonviolent resolutions.”

Others in the 150,000-strong Muslim community of North Texas called the Fort Hood situation full of nuance.

“A major is a big-deal officer, and there is something complicated in this situation and we need to let investigators do their work,” said Mohammad Alibiary, president and CEO of the Carrollton-based Freedom and Justice Foundation, told the newspaper.

Qaseem Ali Uqdah, who was a Marine for 21-years before becoming the Executive Director at American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, now fears a “witch-hunt” like that which followed September 11, 2001.

“This is a criminal act and we have to treat it like a criminal act, not something to do with religion” he told reporters.

For the estimated 3,500 Muslims in the US armed forces, Uqdah said there could be some fallout from the attack.

“What we don't need is people downrange sitting in foxholes [in Afghanistan or Iraq] questioning if you are a Christian, if you are a Muslim or if you are a Jew... that is not what we need as a nation. We need to fight the war on terror together," he added.