‘Hajji’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

March 19th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

The media is struggling to understand who Staff Sergeant Robert Bales is, and why he allegedly shot 16 Afghan civilians, but since he hasn’t given any interviews, the only way to do this is comb through the digital fragments he’s left behind over the last few years. However, the details being held up as insights into a troubled mind are just descriptions of Army life. If every soldier who did what Bale did — used bad words to talk about Iraqis and Afghans, had marital problems — we’d have a million war criminals.

For instance, on Monday The Wall Street Journal unearthed an April 2010 Facebook chat between Bales and a childhood friend while Bales was in Iraq. When asked how the deployment was going, Bales said, “Overseas is boring this trip, pretty dumb. Giving money to Hagi instead of bullets don’t seem right.” The Journal implies that the use of “hagi” — actually spelled hajji, as in one who’s made the Haj — indicates an underlying lack of respect for Iraqis, and explains that “the attitude expressed seemed to clash sharply with sentiments [Bales] has voiced publicly” that he liked helping the Iraqi people. But that’s unfair. Soldiers use the term “hajji” the way junior high boys use the term “gay” — too much, sure, and it’s worth telling them to stop, but it doesn’t indicate they’re contemplating a hate crime. More important, the sentiment Bales expressed is even more banal. “Paying people not to kill us” is the formulation that I’ve heard literally dozens of veterans use to refer to what the rest of the country calls the “Sunni Awakening,” when Sunni Iraqis turned against Al Qaeda during the surge. The official government line is that the Sunnis rejected terrorism and began policing their own communities; the U.S. gave these “Sons of Iraq” money and P.T. belts, the reflective neon strip soldiers wear while working out. But from soldiers’ point of view, the government was paying off the same people who had been attacking them. The sentiment is so ubiquitous it’s illustrated for laughs in this web comic, Terminal Lance:

Military officials have begun portraying Bales as man troubled by financial struggles, and this weekend, The Washington Post furthered that perception. “Years of overseas duty on a sergeant’s salary had squeezed the family’s resources to the breaking point, and now Bales’s wooded property was in disrepair and more than $50,000 underwater,” The Post said. The thing is, it’s when soldiers are in combat that the money really rolls in. Soldiers get extra money — combat pay and separation pay — plus their salaries aren’t taxed, and the soldier has zero expenses — food, housing, clothing are all taken care of. All he has to pay for are things like haircuts, energy drinks, and the pirated DVDs the locals sell on base, which are referred to, by the way, as “hajji copies.” If Bales’ family was struggling financially, it’s not because of repeated deployments. Soldiers don’t make a lot of money, but they don’t make less overseas.