* In a way, one could almost feel sorry for him. He did his (sadly limited) best to express his motivation (i.e., resentment over American bombing of his native country, Afghanistan) – but everybody insists that it must really be something else, instead.
* A similar, but less serious example of this reasoning occurred in Paris in 2013.
Two gays were severely beaten late one night. This happened around the time millions of traditionalists were taking to the streets to protest against the gay marriage law, which later passed. The badly beaten-up face of one of victims, Wilfred de Bruijn, was widely circulated.
Though it wasn’t immediately clear who had done the beating, many blamed the “atmosphere of homophobia” brought about by catholics and right-wingers opposed to gay marriage.
If I recall correctly, it turned out the culprits were “youths”, hardly surprising if you weren’t plugged into the media narrative.
Five months later, four suspects of committing the homophobic beatings were arrested by the police. And indeed they turned out to be “youths” from the suburbs. Two were sentenced a year later. Their names were Taieb and Malik. It’s fair to surmise they were not Catholics worried about preserving the traditional family unit. (As should have been obvious just from the neighborhood where the crime happened). But so much later after the fact, no one was paying attention anymore.
And so the regretful violence had at least the redeeming value of making people more aware of the danger of homophobia and of resisting social progress…
I just saw Anderson Cooper berating a Florida official in charge of helping the Orlando victims and their families for not supporting gay marriage. It’s the same mechanism. If you ever had any doubts about any aspect of gay liberation, don’t you feel guilty now? If not, you’re a fascist and a murderer.
* Omar Mateen lived in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is 40.9% black and 21.6% Hispanic. The city has a female mayor and two of its four city council members are named Rufus and Reginald (no need to click on their pictures to figure out what race they belong to). It’s so “diverse” that it’s pretty good odds that city council will be 100% non-white within 20 years.
Somehow a brown, Muslim Democrat from a diverse city slaughtering other Democrats is the fault of Republicans. It always is.
* Watching the 10 pm tv news the spin is very predictable. They downplayed his gayness and brought out some Muslim cleric who denounced violence and stated that Islam was a tolerant religion that loves everybody. However, I noticed he was a cleric of the Ahmadiyya sect, a persecuted minority within Islam based in Pakistan. The media always go to this unrepresentative sect for soundbites. This is part of the program of lying to the American public. The more one pays attention the more one realizes how everything is spin.
* The disturbing thing to me about this and the San Bernardino shooting is that they’re laying down a new pattern for crazy people inclined toward mass shootings, especially if they’re Muslim.
This zero called 911 to proclaim his allegiance to ISIS just before he went on his murder spree. I think the San Bernardino idiots did something like that with a Facebook post right before or during their murder spree. That didn’t make any difference anywhere else except in making sure their mass shootings would get more attention.
The Orlando shooter also declared allegiance to a couple of other Islamic terrorist groups that are at war with ISIS–I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess he wasn’t exactly a scholar of radical Islamic movements. (Or probably anything else.). He associated himself with those movements to get more attention for his crime.
