Since the news about the Fort Hood massacre, the Muslim community in Galveston and, I am sure, around the world, strongly denounces these vicious acts and full heartedly prays for the victims and their families.
I have a severely bleeding heart since I heard about this horrible nightmare.
My heart bleeds for the victims who died and were wounded, for they have done nothing to deserve their terrible circumstances.
My heart bleeds for the families of the victims — their offspring, their siblings, their parents and all their relatives.
My heart bleeds for the personnel in the army who were and are closely associated with the aftermath of this sad episode, for they are now feeling vulnerable because what happened was done in their own fort, supposedly the safest place on Earth for them.
My heart bleeds for the higher-ups in the fort, as they must feel gravely guilty because they trusted the accused killer and did not envision that such horrible events could happen in their fort and under their own management. Specifically, Fort Hood is designed to psychologically prepare soldiers for deployment to war zones and is also designed to receive and to heal those coming back from such zones.
My heart bleeds for the immigrant parents of the accused killer — even though I deprecate him and his cruel acts — as they should be gravely disenchanted in their offspring, as they must have thought they had raised a good son, not a vindictive, weak and mentally imbalanced one. They must have worked hard to provide for him the necessary environment that allowed him to gain education in a good university, succeed in obtaining medical schooling and receive residence training in an elite military hospital to become hypothetically a psychiatric and psychological healer.
My heart bleeds for his teachers and those who trained him because they must be extremely disappointed in him and his criminal behavior as he turned out to be a broken healer instead of a good one.
My heart bleeds for his superiors for they must be mystified for placing him in one of the most critical positions in the military command — to psychologically prepare and rejuvenate combatants going to and coming back from the combat.
This man has no excuse whatsoever, stress or otherwise, to behave the way he did. He received and betrayed the trust of his family, who spent their life raising him; the trust of his educators, who spared no effort to teach him; the trust of his superiors, who placed him in such a critical position; the trust of his patients, who opened to him their hearts and minds; and ultimately the trust of our country, which was going to deploy him to defend us.
My heart bleeds for the whole world, for people in the world sometimes put faith in people who don’t deserve such confidence.
My heart bleeds for all of the above groups, for some groups are trying to throw logs in the fire to hasten the flames of the tragedy, deepen the pain and agony of those involved and foster backlash and cracks in our community. They are doing that by linking the unacceptable behavior of this man to the Islamic faith. They theorize that the murderer is driven by his Islamic beliefs.
My heart also bleeds for the Islamic faith, for some of its so-called followers don’t even follow the simplest and basic commands of the faith, which indicates that “whoever kills one person as if he slaughtered the whole humanity.”
This person betrayed us all — Muslims, Christians, Jews and others — for no reason whatsoever.
Now, I can only pray to the Almighty, our Supreme Healer, to heal our wounds and to revivify all the bleeding hearts, including mine.
Dr. Ahmed E. Ahmed is a professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch and a member of the Galveston Islamic Center.
