The news from Oklahoma that a man went haywire in his place of work and beheaded a co-worker, and seemed ready to take out as many people as he could in a style now made popular in the snuff videos posted online by ISIS has — what else? — led to a new controversy and speculation being presented as near fact. Was this an example of a mentally loose cannon who absorbed too much of what was on the news and Internet, or the opening salvo in a war by people of a certain religion (guess which) to start murdering Americans? Here are the actual facts:
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A man suspected of beheading a woman he worked with and stabbing another was a convicted felon who had been released from probation this year, Oklahoma corrections officials confirmed Thursday.

Alton Nolen, 30, was released from probation in April, earlier than the original 2017 date, said Jerry Massie, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.

Nolen has a string of convictions from 2011, including marijuana possession, escape from detention, assault and battery on a police officer and possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, according to records from state corrections officials.
So we know a) he has a record b)he’s not you normal person off the street who people would say absolutely shocked them because he loved flowers, took in stray dogs, and helped old ladies across the street.

FBI and police in Moore, Okla., are investigating the incident, which occurred at about 4 p.m. Thursday at the Vaughan Foods plant, Sgt. Jeremy Lewis of the Moore Police Department told The Times on Friday. Nolen was shot during the attack and is hospitalized, according to authorities.

He said police responded to a call reporting that a man, later identified by police as Nolen, was attacking employees inside the business and that shots had been fired.

When they arrived, he said, officers found that one woman, identified as Colleen Hufford, 54, had been beheaded. Another woman, 43-year-old Traci Johnson, suffered knife wounds and was transported to a local hospital, where she was listed in stable condition Friday.

Police said Nolen had been fired from Vaughan Foods shortly before the attack. Witnesses told officers that Nolen had recently been trying to convert several employees to Islam, but it was not clear whether that was why he was fired, authorities said.

And it turns out he is a Muslim:

According to the department’s database, Nolen had “Jesus Christ” tattooed across his chest, an image of praying hands on his right arm and “As-salaamu Ataikum,” tattooed on his stomach, which could be a misspelling of “As-salaamu Alaikum,” a standard Muslim greeting that means “Peace be upon you.”

So far details indicate this sounds like the case of an enraged fired worker, no matter how genuine fears are that some “freelancers” sympathetic to ISIS will start following the terrorist, death-cult groups call to kill American civilians:

After he was dismissed in a different part of the property, police said, Nolen drove his car to the front, ramming it into another car. Authorities said he then entered the front office and killed Hufford, before turning to attack Johnson.

According to Moore City Manager Steve Eddy, the knife recovered at the scene is the same type used on the production floor of the plant, where Nolen worked.

A 911 call released by Moore police Friday afternoon shows some of the chaos that unfolded in the plant. “We can hear a lot of screaming,” said one man who told a dispatcher he was in a nearby office. “We know that he’s loose, he has stabbed someone.”

“Lock everybody in there if you can,” the dispatcher told the caller, right before gunshots rang out in the background.[Los Angeles Times]

It sounds like these employees were lucky:

Mark Vaughan, the company’s founder, chief operating officer and a reserve sheriff’s deputy, was on site at the time and shot Nolen, stopping the attack before police arrived, Lewis said.

Vaughan has been a reserve officer with the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office since 2010, officials there said, and is a “highly trained member of the tactical team.”

It’s no surprise that a spokesman for an Islamic group in Oklahoma quickly distanced the group from Nolan, pointing out that Nolan’s homicidal actions do not reflect the beliefs of Islam. And, indeed, his actions no more reflect the way most Muslims behave and believe than the actions of the arrested Isrealis who grabbed a Palestinian teen off the streets in Israel and murdered him in cold blood to retaliate for the death of three Jewish teens kidnapped and murdered by Hamas reflect the views, actions and beliefs of most Jews. Two days ago Israeli forces killed two Hamas members suspected of murdering the Jewish teens.

A spokesman for an Oklahoma City Islamic group says a man accused of beheading one woman and attacking another at a food processing plant from which he was fired was seen as “a little odd” and “a little weird” by those who attended the same mosque he did.

Saad Mohammed, director of information for the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, said Saturday that Alton Nolen began worshipping at one of the group’s mosques in May and that he has seen him there several times since.

He says Nolen wasn’t outgoing and that his behavior didn’t raise any red flags. Mohammed says Nolen attended services where sermons were delivered against beheadings like those committed by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, militants. He says Nolen’s actions do not reflect the beliefs of Islam.[CBS News]

But what we know and what has not been firmly established is largely irrelevant into today’s politics. Charles Johnson summarizes it quite well:

Why are the right wing blogs fear-mongering like rabid weasels over this? Because Nolen reportedly is a recent convert to Islam. That’s all it takes for them to label him a “Muslim terrorist” and start screeching about Muslims in general supporting terrorism.

But the story is sadly straightforward — Nolen was fired from his job, and angry about it. He had a long history of criminal behavior, including assault, and he took out his anger on his co-workers like many disgruntled former employees before him. Pointing at Islam as his motivation is nothing but sheer bigotry, especially coming from the crowd that invariably excuses gun violence as “mental illness” when it’s committed by a white person.

Some Tweets also show how this is playing among some conservatives:

The reality:
1. Nolan had a criminal history.
2. He was enraged about being fired.
3. He had been a religious Christian and converted to Islam.
4. There is no proof this is the opening salvo in freelancers trying to kill Americans civilians throughout the land.
5. American history gives many examples of how copycat crimes become the norm. How many school shoots took place periodically 50 years ago? Once they started, they continued.
6. Kids, adults, intelligent people and the mentally unhinged are all imprinted in some ways. It’s most likely that he was enraged, had seen ISIS’ snuff videos and struck based on his anger, his built up past failures, and the fact he had watched beheading videos on the Internet.
7. His action is not typical of “Islam.”
8. Our politics operates now on fanning up resentments and hate against groups. ISIS deserves all the hatred and retaliation “civilized” people and religions of all types heap on it. The vast majority of Muslims and Muslim groups are as appalled by ISIS as non Muslim and non Muslim groups are.
9. You can build ratings (Fox knows) on jumping on a story like this and you can built website and blog hits.
10. Nuance doesn’t sell. But it sometimes is reality, particularly in the an instance where it involves a crime still under investigation.

This story right now — until more is established — is in the area of nuance, not black and white or Muslim and non-Muslim.

And at this, stage, at least, it seems like the case of a person with a criminal past, enraged over being fired going on a rampage using a technique of murder that has been pitchforked into the headlines and all over the Internet.

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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