Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials are working with groups around the United States to combat possible anti-Muslim backlash following the shooting rampage at Fort Hood,Texas, by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, reports The Associated Press. Hasan, who was serving as a US Army psychiatrist, born in Virginia, is an American-born citizen.

In a recent statement, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano attempted to reassure Arabs and Muslims that the American authorities are taking measures to quell anti-Islam and anti-Arab sentiments.

Yet, mosques across the country have requested additional police patrols, reports Dawns, while others have made private security arrangements.

Representative Andre Carson (D-IN, 7th District), one of two Muslims currently serving in Congress, cautioned Americans against focusing on Hasan’s religion. However, numerous Muslim organizations protested that they have so far received dozens of death threats and hate e-mails.

“This is in no way a reflection of Islam any more than Timothy McVeigh’s actions are a reflection of Christianity,” affirmed Carson, who supervised an anti-terrorism unit in Indiana’s Department of Homeland Security and comes from a family of Marines.

Robert Salaam, a blogger and former US Marine who converted to Islam shortly after 9/11, warned nonetheless that the actions of one man can affect all Muslims. He noted that some non-Muslims in America still believe “an entire religious community shares responsibility for the actions of one guy.”

Yet, investigations by the FBI and the military police into the shootings have linked Nidal Hasan to internet postings which allegedly refer to suicide bombers "whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers," reports The Guardian.

Furthermore, US intelligence agencies learned that the gunman had contacts with US-born Anwar Al-Awlaki late last year. The agencies relayed that information to authorities before he went on the shooting spree, US officials have declared, reports Reuters.

Al-Awlaki has spent years publishing anti-US views sympathetic to Al-Qaeda to his English-language followers on the Internet, using blogs, video, audio lectures and lengthy articles.

One of Al-Awlaki’s favorite themes is the minority status of Muslims in the West, which intensified when a blog entry was posted on his website in his name praising the killings and calling Hasan "a hero." Yet, findings so far remain inconclusive to determine if the shootings were motivated by terrorism.

Ben Flanagan at Maktoob News deplores the role of the media in this tragedy seizing Fort Hood’s attacks as an excuse to promote a belligerent approach towards Islam and Muslims. He remarks that much of the reporting in America has focused on the religion and ethnic background of Hasan, hinting at the possibility that his crime could emerge to be a terrorist plot.

“Why must we discount wider political and psychological factors as being responsible or partly responsible for Hasan’s terrible alleged crimes?” asks Flanagan. “It’s because the right-wing media has a habit of using ‘Islam’ as some sort of synonym for ‘terrorism’ or ‘violence,’” he continues.

Jacob Weisberg disagrees and points and argues for Newsweek that Fort Hood is “not just a major act of domestic terrorism, but one struck from inside our security apparatus.” He writes that even when interpreted as the action of a “crazed individual operating independently,” Fort Hood threatens Obama's premise that greater outreach and sympathy toward Islam is a viable strategy for countering extremism.

Weisberg believes that the warning signs were ignored due to a “desire to avoid appearing prejudiced or unfair to Muslims.” “America does not face a threat from the perversion of faith in general. We face a threat from the perversion of one faith in particular,” he concludes.

President Barack Obama’s policy of "Islamic rapprochement" has come under scrutiny after the Fort Hood shootings, followed by the discovery of a number of domestic terrorist plots, questioning if the president has been too conciliatory to a group comprising 1.3 billion people worldwide, reports The National.

Even before the Fort Hood shootings, the ground underneath the president’s “Islamic rapprochement” was shifting because of a spate of alleged domestic terrorist plots uncovered in recent months. The news site remarks, “True, the shootings have prompted some instances of especially noxious religious bigotry,” but the intense media scrutiny is “being driven at least partly by swelling indications that the motive for his attack may have been partly connected to his Muslim faith.”

In the political storm now brewing, there will inevitably be a wrangle over who is a “good” Muslim and who is not, and the president is likely to seek the support for his views from Muslims and other likeminded US citizens.

Veteran Today points out nonetheless that Fort Hood accounted for more suicides than any other army post since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a fact that seems to have been largely overlooked in the media frenzy. Fort Hood is one of the largest military bases in the country and has been heavily involved with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This year alone, Fort Hood is averaging over ten suicides each month -- at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year alone. Veteran Today also cites a similar incident on May 11, 2009, when a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad.

Hasan joined the army just out of high school. He had counseled wounded war veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, and was transferred to Fort Hood in April. He had recently received orders to deploy to Afghanistan.

Diana Mukkaled of Asharq-Alawsat remarks, “In one aspect, Hasan's deed points to a kind of American violence, but on the other hand, it is easy to include it in the context of violence committed by Muslims in several parts of the world.”

She further asserts that what is certain and absolute is that Hasan is as American as Timothy McVeigh was American.