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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
The guy stinks at expressing himself, no argument there. He suffers from not having learned to parse every syllable as does most every other politician. So he’s making rookie mistakes. It’s also a huge reason why he’s going to be the GOP nominee.
But please riddle me this: if a white judge belonged to a group called “The Race,” a name it shared with a White Nationalist organization, do you think he or she should be sitting in judgment over an accused Black Panther? Or would the defendant have a justifiable concern over the the judge’s impartiality?
I submit that’s all that Trump was trying to say . . . and why he can’t find people to help him say that remains a mystery. But it shouldn’t cloud the very real issue he’s raising, which as Bryan G. Stephens points out, is about an obvious double standard. Everyone gets to invoke their tribe, apparently, but members of one race, one gender, one sexual orientation. That’s a sickness that will destroy this society if it’s not addressed head-on.
I thought that Matt Barber at Townhall.com made some really terrific observations on this matter this weekend with his article … A ‘Gay’ Muslim Democrat Walks Into a Bar…
In the wake of the Orlando ISIS bloodbath, the rational world now gazes through the looking glass, jaws agape, into the up-is-down, male-is-female, Muslim-is-Christian alternate universe in which resides America’s caterwauling left.
One thing and one thing alone is responsible for the deaths of 49 club-going revelers – precious souls, each – last Sunday in Orlando. It is the global menace of Islam: a despotic socio-political system based on the incoherent and pseudo-religious ravings of a warring tyrant who, as even the Quran concedes, was a murderous anti-Semite and anti-Christian misogynist and pedophile, hell-bent on world domination (Islamic caliphate).
And now I am shocked (pleasantly) to read that the top Senate Democrat on national security, Diane Feinstein, in essence agreed with Barber in her appearance on “Face The Nation”:
… let me say this, John, this is really a national security issue. It isn’t a gun control issue”…
No, I do not and, yes, he would.
Now, riddle me: if — rather than point out that the judge was a member of a group affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood — the panther had said that he wasn’t going to be tried “by some cracker judge,” would it have been wrong to call him out for his racism?
That the Left says stupid, indefensible, and immoral things does not mean we should.
Who is “we” kemosabe? If you aren’t prepared to fight them with words, deeds or in-kind rhetoric, what will save ‘us’ from their ways?Nominating Mitt Romney again?
It gives me no solace to think that the kind of preaching role-model moralism and turn-the-other-cheek pundits assume to speak for ‘us’ as though we are on the same side.
You can use your pathetic tactics, and those of us who are actual fighters will use ours and I will fight you too if I have to, because on these issues, we are not in accord and barely allied.
I think we want the same outcome(s) but I’m beginning to question even that, since it appears that some folks want to hold onto their virtue while allowing us all to become slaves. In any case I have determined that the tactics you profess are utterly inadequate in the face of what ‘we’ oppose.
Not only did Mateen eagerly claimed ties to ISIS, ISIS eagerly claimed ties to Mateen.
Why not take ISIS at its word? Mateen was one of their soldiers: Orlando was an act of war.
ISIS is an Islamist death cult, so of course they endorsed it. This is neither surprising nor terribly significant to my mind.
Take them at their word that they approve of murder in their name? Sure. Add that to the list of reasons to destroy them.
Absent evidence to the contrary, however, I see no reason to credit them with doing anything more than giving a likely spree-killer a retroactive motive.
The Paris/Brussels attacks were an act of war; this appears to be something quite different.
Please Tom, calling a judge of Mexican descent a MEXICAN, is not the same as calling a Caucasian a Cracker. We don’t need a book of riddles to figure that out.
When al Qaeda strapped bombs on retarded children in Iraq, was that an act of terrorism, or was it a mental health issue?
When an unhinged brat from a powerful afghani family acts consistent with his upbringing and slaughters dozens, is that morally distinct from how the retarded child was used? If so, then the distinction is that the killer is more culpable for being a terrorist.
I find the argument of this original post to be repugnant.
I wonder if Islam created Mateen more than he merely aligned himself with Islam. His Father and immediate family share his worldview: violent and desperate.
Oddly enough for 1300 years starting with its inventor, Islam has attracted the same type of barbarous sociopaths as the vanguard of the movement. Picking from the least civilized members of the periphery. He was a Muslim who took his murderous creed seriously. It fulfilled his needs both religious and psychological.
I don’t know—it could just be the next level of asymmetric warfare. ISIS exploiting the weakness of their enemy by harnessing the American mass-shooter phenomenon to their cause.
Adam Lanza and other mass-shooters are known to have considered themselves heirs to a kind of lineage that began with Columbine. If recapitulating previous horrors is part of the pattern, it is one easily translated into the language of jihad. All the clever Radical Islamists needed to do was to throw a lot of “inspirational” stuff on the web, claim credit for any violence inspired by it, memorialize and lionize the dead “soldier of Islam” and then sit back and wait for the copycats.
I’m not sure what you mean by the term “credit”. I would use the word “blame”, but that’s just me. It seems you are taking great pains to divorce this man’s actions from a widely accepted ideology that professes murder and mayhem, as though his supposed insanity overrides these significant influences.
I must question your definition of sanity. I don’t think you really know what it actually means. This man was able to hold down a job, convince two women to marry him, drive a car, purchase guns, case attack venues, tell people why he was acting out, travel to Mecca with a dozen NYPD officers, and fool two sets of FBI agents into believing he was harmless.
Under what I have to assume your definition of sanity is, then we should forget about terms such as Islamism, naziism and racism and simply declare war on insanity. Put all these folks into the same category and proceed. However, I would be wary about having you and others like you on the board who decides who is sane and who isn’t.
Obama knows better than they do.
I’ve never heard this before about Lanza.
From the LA Times:
“Lanza had “hundreds of documents, images, videos pertaining to the Columbine H.S. massacre including what appears to be a complete copy of the investigation,” according to the Newtown report.
Lanza had downloaded several videos about the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot to death 12 fellow students and a teacher before shooting themselves. It was then the worst school shooting in U.S. history.
And Lanza didn’t just passively consume: He had posted on a blog that was dedicated to mass shootings and Columbine in particular, investigators said.
This likely adds another chapter to a grim thesis held by some researchers: that 14 years later, the Columbine massacre still serves as a master script of nihilistic, spectacular violence for other shooters to follow.
In an analysis of school rampages between 1999 and 2007, Professor Ralph W. Larkin of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York found that eight out of 12 shooters “directly referred to Columbine.”
What are the chances that “Orlando” will serve as a new master script for Omar-Wannabes?
This has been my issue with this post as well. Do you have a clinical definition of “craziness” and “a few screws loose”? If you’re going to ascribe mental illness as a cause, then you should have a clear definition of what that entails, not just the popular slang terms non-professionals use to describe someone who strikes others as not normal. As Franco points out, Mateen was a functioning member of society. Anger is not mental illness, it’s just anger. Following a religion that teaches it is your sacred duty to act as judge, jury, and executioner of evil-doers provides a means to express that anger, with the added bonus that you’re doing Allah’s will. Mateen attended a mosque that had already produced a suicide bomber, an imam from Manchester, England who preached that killing homosexuals was the merciful thing to do had recently visited and given a talk, Mateen had watched a lot of ISIS videos and they called for attacks during Ramadan, etc. Islam sanctioned his anger and made it righteous.
It seems helpful to me in this regard that society condemns homophobia so hard. One of the real appeals of Columbine was the blank slate nature of the motives; people could and did project themselves onto it. Just as Mateen felt the need to explain that he wasn’t anti black, though, my guess is that most killers for whom homophobia isn’t a motivator will find a socially condemned motive a powerful distancing factor. With Columbine, there was a whole industry of anti bullying, social inclusivity advocates to exploit and hence glamorize the killers. This time it’s just the Islamists, racists, and gun grabbers seeing their agendas advanced (I should have noticed that Mateen’s race is probably also helpful for reducing white shooter identification).
Obviously, if you’re an ISIS following guy, you’d be nuts not to see him as a model. I don’t think so much for homophobes; the response to the killing has been pretty uncomplicatedly pro-gay. If you had an anti-gay agenda, it’s hard to see this as a successful contribution.
Thanks for that. It’s not surprising. Lanza was mentally ill, and the mentally ill fixate.
The combination of Islamism, sexual self-doubt and schizophrenia is a tough one.
Now that’s a scary thought. This is so real that even Diane Feinstein has acknowledged this threat to national security on Face the Nation.
The other “master script” that is infuriating are these knee-jerk statements like that of federal Assistant Special Agent in Charge (of the investigation) Ron Hopper … “[Mateen] does not represent the religion of Islam, but a perverted view” …
How interesting that this “master script” is always quick to condemn such killers as directly representing the NRA and gun ownership. Compare and contrast.
At the risk of over-psychologizing myself, does Tom’s reply (which you succinctly eviscerate) reflect some sort of Center-Right self-loathing? In these situations what’s played back by the Left and, sadly, some compatriots often seems to take pride in mischaracterization. Perhaps it’s a form of Stockholm Syndrome . . . battered by the Left’s enforced rules of acceptable thought, some go out of their way to demonstrate adoption of their captors’ worldview.
That worldview begins with this demand of opponents: “First prove every word you say cannot be attributed to some ill-spirit.” Since proving a negative is not possible it’s End of Debate time: the Left wins by default.
The point Franco and Kate Braestrup make more eloquently elsewhere is that only one side in this pantomime acquiesces to fighting by lopsided rules. What stuns me is how detached from seeking victory Tom and others have become: they appear to have zero awareness that by adopting the Left’s rules they are condemned to defeat. It’s as though after Pearl Harbor we eschewed carrier-based aviation because Japan put it to a horrible use. After Orlando, we have to find reasons it’s not Islamic radicalism’s fault because . . . why, exactly? Because such broad-mindedness redounds to our sophistication and superior moral reasoning? I’d settle for winning—for destroying rather than excusing.
Since we are at war with the first and have not demonstrated much ability to resolve the latter two, I for one see nothing wrong with staying focused upon the role of Islamic radicalism in the Orlando atrocity.
Oh, for crying out loud.
What if the defendant had simply said “I can’t be tried by a white judge because he’s biased against me?”
If the Black defendant in this scenario said exactly what you originally ascribed to him or this milder version, the cultural cognoscenti would excuse it with at most a tsk tsk for overly expressive language. That’s the point I think you are missing. (Shock) There is not a level playing field on the issue of race. A white judge belonging to a group called “The Race” . . . you don’t acknowledge that this thought finishes itself? He or she would not remain on the bench for 24 hours after it became public knowledge. Why is it different for a group catering to racist Latino lawyers instead of racist Caucasian lawyers? (We’ll ignore for the time being the fact that Latinos are Caucasian, just to keep things moving along here.)
Probably after the defendant showed cause, like the judge belonged to an organization affiliated with the KKK on their website, said defendant would apply for and, no doubt receive, a change of venue. So….?
No, I get it, I simply disagree that the Left’s behavior should guide ours to
Of course I do. And as I’ve said, I’m totally game for holding Curiel accountable for his membership with the San Diego group. That doesn’t mean that any and all attacks on him are valid.
When teaching special education for more the 40 years I frequently worked with adolescents who were both violent and deranged. However, in my entire career I was only assaulted once, that in my last year. Interestingly, the young man who attacked me had the same diagnosis as Adam Lanza. He had a long history of such attacks on teachers and teaching staff, however, prior to his entering my school Special Education saw fit to sanitize his records, so that I was completely unprepared for his attack. This is a common practice and may explain Bryan’s statement. The same occurs with the unnamed group.
Totally agree, and I’m now directly opposed top such people who refuse to fight. They gaze at their navels and play parlor games with their wonderful ideals that have zero basis in reality and then have the chutzpah to lecture others on how they should conduct discourse. They even claim to be able to judge bigotry on the basis of ill-advised use of modifiers when they themselves can’t make a proper analogy, and then say “fer cryin’ out loud” as though we all should know what they really meant.
By the way, the term “all white jury” is used with a straight-face for decades and we all know what it means. I wonder if Tom has ever called them out for ‘bigotry”. I’m guessing not.
Clearly, that’s the logical inference. ;)
But, of course, Curiel does not get held accountable! It’s nice you are “game” for it, but the political/cultural reality is he will not be forced from the bench, nor recused. Why should any of us acquiesce to the stacked rules we are being made to live by? Why should Trump accept it in his court case? Why shouldn’t every patriot resist this form of tyranny? Because the Left’s behavior must not “guide” ours? You’re talking tactics now . . . personally, I’ve no problem with Minutemen hiding behind tress rather than standing in a row to take volleys from greater-numbered, better armed Red Coats. You won’t win if you self-impose tactics that lock-in your opponent’s inherent advantages.