Orlando outrage

Published June 15, 2016

EVEN as the initial news flashes emerged about a gunman going on a rampage in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, one was compelled to wonder how long it would be before someone expressed the view that matters would not have come to such a pass had the revellers been armed.

It didn’t take very long: “If you had some guns in that club the night that this took place … you wouldn’t have had the tragedy that you had.” None other than the presumptive Republican nominee for the presidency came up with this gem, after congratulating himself on calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration to the US.

You wouldn’t expect Donald Trump to draw the line there, and he didn’t. The deadliest mass shooting in US history provided cause for him to effectively blame Barack Obama for its occurrence and to claim that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, just doesn’t get it. In his limited vocabulary, ‘Islamic radicalism’ is the key demonising phrase. And anyone who doesn’t utter it with the kind of vehemence he brings to the pulpit is complicit in terrorism.

Initial responses to the monumental tragedy were clouded by whether to designate it an act of terrorism or a hate crime. It’s an artificial dichotomy. Most acts of terrorism, Islamist or otherwise, are driven by some kind of hatred. In the case of Orlando, as Obama has suggested, the two coincided in a perverse mind.

Like Trump, however, most Republican figureheads have either ignored or understated the homophobia that persuaded Omar Mateen to go on his killing spree at this particular venue. And they have been equally reluctant to broach the question of his ready access to assault weapons despite the declarations of empathy with Islamist militancy that brought him to the FBI’s attention some years ago.


Islamists don’t have a monopoly on homophobia.


The FBI, it seems, didn’t find cause for too much concern. But once Mateen was on its radar as at least a sympathiser with deplorable causes, should it not at the very least have become harder for him to shop for weapons? Apparently not, at least in Florida.

Trump also seems to be oblivious to the fact that Mateen wasn’t an immigrant. He was born in the US. Perhaps he means to suggest that Mateen’s Afghan parents would never have been admitted into America under his watch, but he hasn’t clearly articulated that view, nor shared his thoughts on how his nation ought to have reacted back when jihad was the cause du jour in a Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

Mateen is said to have pledged allegiance to the militant Islamic State group in calls to 911 during his killing spree, and reports suggest IS has claimed responsibility for the Orlando atrocity. None of that necessarily means very much. There has been no indication so far that the mass killer was guided in his murderous intent by voices from overseas.

Obama has clearly admitted as much, describing Mateen as a homegrown extremist. The extent to which he was radicalised by his interactions on the internet remains to be determined, as do various other aspects of the terror in the Pulse nightclub — including why it took the police nearly three hours to directly intervene after the initial indications of an unfolding catastrophe.

What we do have, meanwhile, are indications that as a high school student Mateen revelled in the 9/11 attacks. It wouldn’t be outrageous to claim that his attitude was guided by what he picked up at home. It is certainly intriguing in this context to discover that Omar’s dad, Seddique Mateen, claims to be the “Provincial Government of Afghanistan” (perhaps he means provisional) and appears to support “the real Taliban who live in North and South Waziristan”, as opposed to “the mercenaries of the ISI, who come to Afghanistan under the name of the Taliban and kill our Afghan brothers and sisters”.

In a video message this week mourning the death of his son — “I was not informed he had a grudge” — this vehement opponent of the Durand Line wrapped up by declaring: “Death to Pakistan, which supports killing and terrorism.”

That may not be a particularly unusual Afghan view, yet the content of Seddique Mateen’s Facebook page may give those probing his son’s intellectual instability cause to probe the possibility of hereditary dysfunction.

There is plenty of cause to mourn the massacre of 49 innocents, and there cannot be much doubt that the perpetrator’s interpretation of his inherited faith played a role in his perverse act of violence. Islamists don’t have a monopoly on homophobia, though. And they certainly are not responsible for the gun laws that make deadly assault weapons readily available to Americans of all descriptions.

Finally, whereas Trump may be reasonably accurate in his description of Omar Mateen as “a wack job”, the crucial question remains whether Americans think they deserve a wack job as their president and commander-in-chief. We’ll find out in a few months.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2016

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