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The (Non)-Meaning of Orlando
It does not appear to be a coincidence that Omar Mateen was Muslim, nor that he pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State as he massacred patrons at the Pulse nightclub. But as documented in lengthy profiles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Mateen spent his entire life spooking and alienating nearly everyone around him, often through threats of violence.
While some of these incidents had a religious tinge, all of them were colored by craziness. As a 14-year-old, he cheered the 9/11 attacks in class … while claiming to be bin Laden’s nephew. While training to become a corrections officer years later, he exploded in anger when a piece of pork touched his hamburger at a cook-out… and subsequently threatened to murder all his classmates. Years after that, he was reassigned from guarding the Port St. Lucie courthouse after claiming (out of the blue, it seems) to have links to both Sunni and Shia terror groups. Even as he pledged his allegiance to ISIS during the massacre, he stopped to tell his victims that “I don’t have an issue with the blacks.” These are less the actions of a devout Muslim extremist than of a Muslim who — if not actually unhinged — was in possession of some profoundly loose screws and a deeply violent soul. What’s most surprising to me is that it took him 29 years to kill someone.
The Left has cast the Orlando massacre as a hate crime against gays, while much of the Right sees it as nothing less than a terrorist attack inspired by the Islamic State. But if the newspaper profiles shed any light on the matter, it was simultaneously both of these things and neither of them. Rather, Omar Mateen was likely one of those people who would have eventually murdered a roomful of people under one pretext or another, regardless of his upbringing or religion.
Everything that was true the day before the Orlando attack is still true today: Jihadists are evil and should be destroyed, and nut jobs will occasionally murder a bunch of innocents out of some combination of derangement, cowardice, anger, and frustration. That Islamism and insanity overlapped here, unfortunately, tells us very little about either that we didn’t already know.
Published in General
I work with the Mentally Ill, and I can say that they are less likely to do this sort of thing than the other group I am not allowed to name.
Islamists are evil and should be destroyed, and nut jobs will occasionally murder a bunch of innocents out of some combination of derangement, cowardice, anger, and frustration. That Islamism and insanity overlapped here, unfortunately, tells us very little about either that we didn’t already know.
But why does the overlap of Islamism and young people with these traits lead to conducting these kinds of operations at a rate 1000x more frequently than ticked off members of any other subset of the population?
Quacks. Waddles. Has feathers. I care little what kind of aquatic wild fowl it might be. It is not a dove.
Murderous Islamist no matter how you slice up his “nuances.”
Obviously, the majority of disturbed people are not dangerous in this sense. But of among those who commit spree-killing, almost all of them were nuts: Seung-Hui Cho, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Elliot Rogers, Jared Loughner. All of them were severely disturbed; a few of them (particularly Rogers, who seemed somewhat less nuts) latch onto a recognizable ideology.
At the most, this seems to have been a case of ISIS inspiring someone who probably would have killed for some reason to kill for a particular reason. That’s not nothing, but it’s not much. It’s pretty pathetic compared to say, the Paris/Brussels attacks.
I think that number’s more than a little inflated, but it’d hardly be surprising if an actual group advocating its co-religionists to murder would inspire a few more marginal cases than the baseline.
That said, most terrorists don’t appear to be insane. Sane people — particularly those who believe in a murderous religion — kill plenty, but they tend to kill differently.
Was Elliot Rogers’ a “murderous men’s rights advocate”? In some sense yes, but not in any way that says anything useful.
?
If there were an international organization that inspired him and took credit for his murders, then yes.
Well, the one the President won’t name: Islamism.
He killed 37% as many innocents as the terrorists at Bataclan. That’s not pathetic in my book. That’s a go-get-’em attitude.
It’s possible that he had some mental anguish due to being gay (apparently) and Muslim (not apparently — matter of factly). I do not believe he was mentally ill. I haven’t heard any plausible evidence that he was. He doesn’t look mentally ill. There’s a look, in the eyes. Bryan probably knows what I’m talking about. You can see it on the faces of Loughner, Holmes, Brevik, etc. Also those men, and the others you mentioned, had psychiatric histories. It’s possible that someone might snap and go on a killing spree. But in my experience, the mentally ill slowly get worse and worse over a period of years while their families struggle to get them help only to be thwarted along the way by benighted civil libertarians who crusade for patients’ rights. As my wife wrote a year ago in National Review:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420104/die-dad-die-go-heaven-molly-powell
“Everything that was true the day before the Orlando attack is still true today:”
Yes, mainstream conservative leaders and pundits refuse to address immigration as a major contributor to our problems. They prefer to continue their destructive twin-track policies of Invade the World/Invite the World.
And, given the GOP’s insistence on making arguments that command little public enthusiasm and the Democrats’ unified message on gun control, the Left remains in full charge of the political narrative.
Same as it ever was.
The real mindset of Mateen is revealed by some of his actions during the massacre. Specifically making phone searches of the internet to see whether his activity was getting any publicity. That isn’t the mindset of a man devoted to cause.
And what do you make of his past behavior? The constant threats of mass violence over the years are not the actions of a rational man.
Every population has a background level of crazies.
There is a spectrum here. Loughner, Holmes, and Lanza were clearly absolutely nuts and I agree that Mateen isn’t in the same category as them. Elliot Rogers, however, seems to have been less afflicted and my (very inexpert) guess is that Mateen was rougly on par with him, maybe even a little less so.
(Brevik, I suspect, is sane, or pretty close to it.)
Contrast Mateen’s behavior with that of the Paris/Brussels cell.
Great post, Tom.
Mateen’s kill total is impressive, yes, and I didn’t mean to discount it. We’ll probably know better in the future, but it looks like it was due to a well-chosen venue (which is points against my thesis) and having time to act with impunity. To my knowledge, only the Virginia Tech killer (the previous record holder) had similar amounts of time.
So … what can we do about a person who, according to multiple observers, is violent and doesn’t seem to care about human life? (We’ve had this conversation many times before.)
Until he commits a crime, there’s not much we can do.
Of this I feel quite certain: had this murderer claimed fealty to a Christian group, a homophobic group, or a White racist group no one of any cultural significance would be examining his past in minute detail and fishing for further explanation. The commonsense explanation blaring like a neon sign on a dark night would command everyone’s attention.
Were twisted psycho-sadists attracted to work in Nazi death camps? Sure. Does that diminish Nazi culpability for their atrocities? Of course not. So why should this filthy Islamist scum—regardless of whatever other baggage he may have brought along for the ride—have any sane person explain away his transgressions as something other than what they were: inspired by a hate-filled faction of Islam?
No mass murderer gets this kind of chin-rubbing pantomime except when it’s convenient to the Left. I’m surprised you fell for it . . . it’s sophistry.
Yeah, I agree with this; in the world of American terrorism, Mateen is a rock star. There are a lot of people who have tried to achieve what he did and who failed.
I don’t know how the allegations of training are going to pan out, or if he received online or in person support in planning, nor if any such planning made a difference to the outcome if it took place. Nonetheless, it is often the case that it is extremely useful for an ambitious young man to have institutional support in realizing those ambitions. If this is such a case, then the atrocity is meaningfully about the supporting institution in addition to the other matters implicated.
Also, to be fair, the strong version of the leftist gun control position (there should be no guns) would have made a difference; he’d have had to kill gays with bombs, as Nazis in other countries do. I think that the conservative association is more likely to have made a difference; I don’t get the impression that it would have been much better to have had a large bomb. It’s possible that neither form of effort (to degrade and eliminate terrorist movements, or to degrade and eliminate access to arms) would have made a difference. It’s more or less certain that the policies being put forward by our Presidential nominees wouldn’t have done anything; the moderate leftist position of banning some guns is meaningless, while the Trumpian position of banning Muslim immigration does about as much good.
All of which is to say that most of the significance attached to it is dumb (the suggestion that opponents of SSM must cheer the deaths being the dumbest), but I’m not sure that affiliation with terrorists is necessarily part of that general trend. It’s my guess that we’ll find out more about his training in the future; perhaps there’s a video game scandal that’s yet to hit us.
Mateen contradicts the Left’s narrative that Muslims are harmless, lovable, little fuzzballs. They’ve got to find some explanation other than Islam for his attack. Hence the obsession with his alleged craziness. It wasn’t that he was an Islamist, he was simply crazy.
As Dirty Harry said, “When a naked man is chasing a female down an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t collecting for the Red Cross.”
That’s the understatement of the year.
Exactly.
That’s not his position. That’s the Left’s talking point, but it’s not his position. His position is more accurately condensed down to this: “We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. That must change.”
You can read Trump’s position here, so there’s no reason to misrepresent it.
I just want to reiterate that the bolded was a very bad phrasing on my part and doesn’t make sense as written. The point I was attempting to make was that it’s not impressive on ISIS’s part, but I wish I had simply left it off.
If that was Trump’s consistent message on the matter, I’d be ecstatic. Hell, I wrote something making very nearly that precise argument about a year ago. My problems are that 1) I don’t trust Trump on anything and 2)he can’t maintain that line for more than a few minutes without saying something stupid and/or bigoted.
Then take it up with the Left. I’m not denying that Mateen was inspired by Islamism; but it seems very likely that — in this instance — Islamism overlapped with someone who was a probable spree-shooter.
I’d wager that they won’t pan out. If they do, then I’ll have to come back here to eat some crow.
We basically agree . . . wish Trump had ‘message discipline’ and could stay on that point instead of wandering into shoal waters in a manner that almost seems absentminded. He ought to understand that everything he says is going to be purposefully misconstrued by his opponents and factor that in to what he says. The caveat needs to be expressed, however, that this shouldn’t be allowed to / need not turn him into the typical inside the beltway GOPer, who is afraid of his own shadow on the topic of immigration and therefore crumbles like old chalk when it comes time to secure our border and pass laws (think Rubio).
Also, I don’t think Trump is bigoted. Do you? He will not open his mouth even once between now and November that this allegation won’t be tossed about by Democrats and their handmaidens in the media. So, we disagree on whether he actually says bigoted things. We agree he needs to do a much better job of framing the issue when he speaks publicly. Then he needs to make misrepresentation of his views a major issue.
I do, yes. His initial statement about Mexican immigration was bigoted, as was his statements about Judge Curiel*, as was his initial statement on Muslim immigration.
(* Had he said that Judge Curiel’s membership in an organization loosely affiliated with NCLR was disqualifying or reprehensible, or whatever, that would be another matter. However, that’s not what he said).
It is as bigoted as the racial tribalism of the left. We live in a highly bigoted society in 2016. The only tribe not allowed to be tribal are straight, white, men.
Which is funny when you think about it, because straight, white, men did most of the heavy lifting to build the Western world.
C’est la vie
It’s almost a “chicken and the egg” situation. What came first, this guy’s antisocial, psychotic behavior or his attraction to Islamism. At this point it seems obvious that one fed off the other. If someone has these Tendencies already then naturally they will be attracted to a belief system that supports that. The fact that his family seems to be more or less involved or aware of his activities leads one to believe this Behavior wasn’t learned in isolation.
It definitely isn’t helpful in the discussion for the Obama Administration to reject his references to Isis and Declarations of intent from the 911 transcripts.
This is essentially Obama’s argument. Except, as HVT points out, if it had been some nut who self-radicalized around some group he could associate with his political enemies.
However the rationale is still utter poppycock.
Are we to psychologize those who throw gays off of buildings, or behead prisoners or burn people alive? They are ‘crazy’ too.
If you care to delve further into psychology, you will find that we are all products of our environments and the beliefs and values of those around us. If enough people express certain viewpoints, one can then easily identify with these precepts and feel justified for their actions. Everyone wants to be a hero to those he identifies with.
Radical Islamism is everywhere and it’s ‘on the move’. The scale and reach of this ideology is unprecedented in recorded history.
The idea that he eventually would have found “something” as a pretext for killing a roomfull of people misses the fact that the FIRST thing he found (after 29 years) was radical Islamic ideology.
Whether this man was ‘insane’ in our view is irrelevant. In fact I believe ‘our’ definition of ‘sanity’ to be quite suspect, given that we are arguing over 31 definitions of gender and claiming climate-change deniers should be prosecuted, and judging people as bigoted based on a couple of broad statements.