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People who call their children names like that tend to identify primarily as members of their (pre-American) tribe, and not primarily as Americans, which kind of proves my point.
Oh, when you said 'American', you meant 'UnitedStates-ian'.
I'm not sure I've made my point clear. As far as I am aware, there is no coherent ideological framework that justifies giving those of English extraction a special claim to the territories of both the United Kingdom and the United States.
One can either:
claim that particular areas of land belong immutably to certain ancestral groups, which would endorse the Daily-Mail reading gammons' calls for remigration of the London-born children and grandchildren of South Asians from England, but also demand the remigration of white people form North America (and possibly the English from Scotland and Wales);
reject ancestral blood-and-soil claims, and judge individuals not by their ethnicity or the etymology of their names but by their personal actions, drawing no distinction between Mr Hasan and a hypothetical alternate-timeline perpetrator born James Anglesax, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower or the Susan Constant and who converted to an extremist form of Islam and committed a similar massacre; or
recognise land as belonging to whichever group is capable of seizing it by force, which would dissolve any ethical high ground between 'a descendant of Englishmen killing a descendant of Arabs to maintain the status quo' and 'a descendant of Arabs killing a descendant of Englishmen to overturn the status quo', and incentivise a metric arse-load of bloodshed until partisans of option 2 manage to establish a claim on behalf of All the descendants of the last common ancestor of all humans to the third planet from a ~two octillion tonne yellow dwarf star in the Orion-Cygnus arm, for now.
All three are logically coherent, but as someone who would greatly prefer that violence be kept to a minimum, I favour the second option.
I didn't say there was. I said that both Hasan and his parents identified primarily as Muslim Arabs and not as Americans. Which seems pretty obvious to me. Some ethnic groups in America do chose to identify as Americans, which is why, for example, Chinese Americans give their children names like Andrew, Amy and Jenny instead of Wei and Fang.
Did you mean to respond to somebody else?
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