The Fort Hood incident fits into a disturbing pattern

Back in 2005 a scholar named Daniel Pipes coined the phrase “sudden jihad syndrome” to describe sudden murderous rampages and actions by otherwise normal people driven by Islamist impulses.

This is what seems to have been at work in the Fort Hood shooting incident.

Americans have now suffered a number of these incidents. Some relate to the military:

• March 23, 2003: In the early morning hours at Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait, before the invasion of Iraq, Hasan Karim Akbar (born Mark Fidel Kools in Los Angeles, Calif.) a US Army sapper with the 101st Airborne Division, threw hand grenades into a tent and fired his rifle into the ensuing chaos, killing two officers. His death sentence is currently under appeal.
• June 1, 2009: In Little Rock, Ark., Abdulhakim Muhammad, formerly Carlos Bledsoe, a convert to Islam, shot and killed two soldiers outside a Little Rock recruiting station to protest US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was caught and arraigned the following day.

Another instance of a sudden, religiously-motivated rampage unrelated to the military occurred on March 3, 2006 at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill when Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an Iranian immigrant and just-graduated student, drove a sport utility vehicle into a crowded student plaza, injuring nine students. Taheri-azar told a 911 dispatcher that he wanted to “punish the government of the United States for their actions around the world.”

On July 4, 2002, Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet, an Egyptian immigrant, attacked the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles Airport, killing two victims before he himself was killed.

Actually, though, Americans haven’t suffered nearly as much from sudden jihad syndrome as people around the rest of the world, especially where Muslim and non-Muslim communities are in close proximity and the friction is common, notably in Israel and India.

In Israel, there has been a steady stream of these sudden rampages. In two instances in Jerusalem, Muslim construction workers used bulldozers to suddenly attack passersby. In India there have been numerous instances of both Hindus and Muslims suddenly rampaging through communities as a result of some incident.

There have also been such sudden attacks in Muslim countries and several in Egypt. In one incident, an Egyptian border guard turned his machine gun on Israeli tourists in the Sinai. One of the most infamous was the sudden crash of an Egypt Air Flight 990 on Oct. 31, 1999 when one of the co-pilots apparently seized the controls and plunged the plane into the sea, a chronology of events the Egyptian government denied then and now.

Pipes, a prolific author and commentator (his website is http://www.danielpipes.org/) , is a longstanding critic of aspects of Islam and some Muslim practices and he in turn has been under near-constant verbal assault by Muslim groups in the United States, notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Perhaps some of Pipes’ comments may seem extreme. But he backs them with scholarly citations and indisputable facts. And when we have an incident like the one at Fort Hood, and one looks back over history, it’s hard not to conclude that there really is such a thing as “sudden jihad syndrome.”