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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
Right, which is why I identified those proposals not with you but with Obama, et. al. I think it’s important to address the political consequences of how we interpret Orlando. Isn’t that the point of talking about it here, on a political forum?
It appears to be one of these instances where people are talking past each other. You have a big post that has little to do with what I posted.
What I said was true. It does not therefore say that you (and large numbers of people) cannot apply meanings to it.
The OP was pointing out how meaning can be lost when application is stretched to thin (I think).
Personally, I think the way to deal with ISIS inspired attacks is to demonstrate that Islamism is a dead end. Once that is done, then it will go away on its own.
I don’t know if you’re still following this, James, but I agree with you. Plain old mass-shooters won’t necessarily use Mateen as a model but wanna-be Islamist volunteer guerrillas will. He did a lot of damage, garnered a whole lot of attention, and made the jihadis over in Syria sit up and take notice.
I tend to agree with HVT on this one— I suppose Mateen could be diagnosed with something, but who couldn’t? Let he who is without mental health issues cast the first pill, but the crimes of Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner could have been prevented by good mental healthcare. (Indeed, both belonged in the hospital.) Is there any reason to think that Omar Mateen was hallucinating, hearing voices, staying awake for days at a time, disassociating, failing to maintain adequate hygiene …? If we had better mental healthcare, would Mateen’s illness (symptoms: he’s a moody, disagreeable wife-beater) have been treated?
I maintain; ISIS knows and names its own.
I sort of agree with this, but I don’t think that “ISIS” and “Islamism” are helpfully conflated. ISIS’ beliefs and the beliefs of the rest of the Islamic world, including Al Qaeda, are pretty different.
It seems likely to me that ISIS in Iraq should fall over the upcoming year (Fallujah by September, Mosul later). It seems likely that if Clinton wins in November without being forced to make too high profile promises to abandon her position on Syria, Assad should make moves toward peace in, roughly, November. If that happens, I’d be surprised if ISIS had a serious objective by, say, 2018. It’s hard to persuade people to join in your effort at world conquest when you don’t have territory. AQ’s original aim of toppling the Saudis is less absurd, but it also seems unlikely to have much in the way of clear and appealing goals. There’ll still be an appeal for “we do this because we’re Muslim and that’s what Muslims do” terrorists, but they tend to be relatively low functioning. It’s possible that even Mateen was less dumb.