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Notes -
"Middle Eastern" is not an ethnicity.
I called him a Palestinian, which is a type of Middle Easterner, just like a German is a type of European.
I agree that "German" is a type of European, and "Germans" refer to people live in Germany, or it can refer to an ethnic group of Germans, typically of German linear genetic descent who live in Germany or in German enclaves or who otherwise have a cultural affinity to Germany, or it could simply refer to a German genetic line. The problem with using the last definition is that it often makes little sense to refer to people who are of one genetic group but another cultural-political group as belonging to the genetic group. For instance, referring to Fred Trump as a German causes more confusion than clarification.
And "Palestinian" has similar issues when used here.
If we're focusing on genetic lineage, it might be more precise to refer to Hasan as Arab or perhaps Palestinian Arab (since there are a few non-Arab Palestinians). If we're focusing on ethnicity in the cultural sense, I am not sure it makes much sense to refer to him as Palestinian - he can't speak Arabic, and as far as I know spent little if any time abroad. From what I've seen, he himself might have used the term "Arab" instead of "Palestinian" if you asked him to describe his ethnic or genetic background.
From what I can tell, whatever feelings towards Palestine or Palestinian identity he may have seen in himself did not play much if any role in the shooting - he saw himself as acting to defend Islam and the Taliban (which obviously are geographically and ethnically distinct from any Palestinians he might have sympathies with), not Palestine.
I think it's fine to say that he is of Palestinian descent, or that his ethnic background is Palestinian or Arab, or what have you. You can describe him accurately. But describing him as a Palestinian terrorist causes more confusion than clarification. It would cause similar confusion if you referred to Donald Trump a European political leader (even though Donald Trump is ethnically 100% European).
To describe him as an American causes even more confusion because Americans basically never shoot American soldiers for the cause of Islam and the Taliban. Middle Easterners, on the other hand, sometimes do. When you say that an American became an Islamic radical and shot up a military base, it buries the lede. If he were a black guy or a white guy or even a Mexican-American who had converted to Islam and done this, sure, that's an American guy who became an Islamic terrorist. But his actions were clearly that of someone from an unintegrated Middle Eastern background who happened to be born in the United States. I don't think you can just normatively decree that anyone with an American citizenship is American and you have to call them as such out of an ideological dedication to a civic nationalist project. It obscures much more than it clarifies, it's kind of an abuse of language.
If a Transylvanian Hungarian killed a bunch of Romanians for anti-Romanian reasons, it doesn't really make any sense to insist that the perpetrator is actually Romanian even though he's a Romanian citizen from Romania. Clearly such a person wouldn't belong to the national community even if they were unambiguously legally Romanian. It's the same thing with Hasan. Yes, he was born in America and an American citizen but if he wasn't from an essentially foreign Muslim family he never would have acted the way he did, like I said above maybe he would have been mentally disturbed in a normal American way and just shot up a school.
No, actually, saying precisely this draws attention to what happened. Saying he was a Middle Easterner, as you point out, is not to say anything unusual. It turns off the brain, or at most makes people think "who let him into the country?" or "how did a Middle Easterner join the military?" when in fact he was born here. Whereas as you say, Americans rarely shoot American soldiers for the cause of Islam and the Taliban. You can actually just say "Nidal Hasan was an American Muslim of Middle Eastern ancestry who joined the U.S. Army. Inspired by his radical Islamist beliefs, he carried out a mass shooting on a military base." If you substitute out "American Muslim of Middle Eastern ancestry" with "Middle Easterner" you make the sentence substantially less informative.
It seems to me that if a black, white, Mexican-American or Arab American shoot up an American military base for the cause of Islam, their actions are all about equal. Hasan's might strike one as less unusual because his familial background was Muslim, but if a white guy attacked a bunch of US soldiers in the name of Islam, he's not somehow acting less like an Islamic terrorist because of his skin tone.
The guy is American by the legal definition of such. If we can normatively decree anything it's that we should respect definitions. And he wasn't even an anchor baby, so there's really no wiggle room to insist he came through on a loophole.
It actually does! If a guy is Romanian, he's Romanian. If a white person kills a bunch of white people for anti-white reasons (which is certainly conceivable) it still makes sense to call him white, too.
Do these sorts of "if a person was a completely different person they would act like they were a completely different person" counterfactuals really clarify these questions? Yes, if Hasan had been a different person, he likely would have done a different thing, I agree. But if your position is that only people from Muslim backgrounds become Islamic radicals, you're wrong about that.
I'm fine with your description of the event in the first paragraph - but the "Middle Eastern ancestry" part is by far the most important thing there. Your original assertion was that "Nidal Hasan is not a Middle Eastern terrorist, he is an American citizen and soldier, born in Virginia, who shot his fellow soldiers to death when they were unarmed in a place of trust." Your new one is conceding that he's a middle eastern terrorist (from the US, with US citizenship, which is true).
The implications are wildly different from those four stories. If a white guy, or a black guy or a Mexican guy converts to Islam and kills a bunch of soldiers, there's not much that can obviously be done about it. If an Arab does it the obvious implication is simple. Stop importing Arabs!
You're conflating two different things in your examples. White ancestry is a biological fact comparable to the Hungarian ancestry of the guy in my hypothetical, not his Romanian citizenship. Citizenship is not. If Romania revoked this guy's citizenship would you say he's no longer a Romanian?
People from Muslim backgrounds are many orders of magnitude more likely to become Islamic radicals and it is willfully ignorant to say otherwise. A Western-born Muslim committing an Islamic terrorist attack is a dog bites man story, a white, black, or Hispanic guy doing it is the other way around.
I doubt this is true, statistically speaking - keep in mind that US Jews have Middle Eastern ancestry. I think "radical Islamist beliefs" is actually the most important thing.
I think there's a big difference between saying someone has ancestry of a place and suggesting they come from a place they don't!
While I am in favor of greater immigration restrictions, I think you can be more imaginative about solutions here. Hasan probably could have been stopped by paying attention to what he was telling his coworkers, and you know, that might also catch the white guy too.
That's an interesting question. If he was born in Romania and didn't have the citizenship of another nation, yes. Otherwise, no. But this is firing from the hip, I'm open to an illustration that this is absurd or contrary to normal and/or legal use.
Well - if your baseline is "all people" then yes, obviously Muslims are more likely to become Islamic radicals than anyone. However my guess is that (at least in the U.K., maybe in the U.S.) a convert to Islam is actually more likely to become an Islamic radical than a person with a preexisting Islamic background. This is me firing from the hip again, feel free to correct me if you have stats handy, but it's not uncommon - for instance, the shoe bomber was a convert, and he wasn't the only one.
There also seems to be a specific issue (as there was with Hasan) of second-generation radicalism, where people whose parents aren't particularly extreme or even devout have kids who become radicalized.
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