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| Omar Mateen |
However recently the meme has started to crumble.Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016
Courtesy of the Daily Mail:
Omar Mateen, the gunman who murdered 49 people in an Orlando gay club early Sunday morning, was a gay man himself according to multiple people who knew and had met the man.
A gay man who attended the police academy in 2006 with Mateen said that the pair went out to gay bars and that at one point Mateen told the man he wanted to pursue a relationship.
Meanwhile, multiple people are now coming forward to say that they had spoken with Mateen on gay hookup apps including Grindr and Jack'd.
The attack, which many assumed was an act of Islamic extremism, now appears to possibly be tied to Mateen's own shame over his sexuality and investigators are now looking into this internal conflict as a possibly motive.
The shooter's father, Seddique Mateen, made his beliefs on gay people very clear in a video he posted to Facebook on Monday saying 'homosexuals will be punished by God.'
While early news reports seemed to focus on Mateen's ties to Islamic groups, that almost seems like an afterthought in light of new evidence which suggests that Mateen was a regular at the Pulse nightclub.
What appears to be emerging is a picture of a man torn between his desire to be loved and the religion which condemned him, and those like him, to death.
Salon makes this rather important point as to why this attack may not serve the Republicans as well as they might hope:
After all, it’s not just fundamentalist Islam that is anti-gay. Fundamentalist Christianity is, too, and if anti-gay religious teachings can cause a Muslim to reach for his gun, they can surely do the same to a Christian. Indeed, hate crimes against LGBT people are common in this country, and most of them are not being committed by Muslims.
All of which, in turn, is going to make it a lot harder for conservatives to demagogue against gay rights to rally the troops. If this is a homophobic crime, then it’s a testament to how anti-gay rhetoric can inspire horrific violence. Conservatives are still smarting over how the racist church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, resulted in the nation turning against those who fly the Confederate flag. There can be little doubt that this crime will lead to a similar darkening of attitudes against those who persist in spewing prejudice against LGBT Americans.
So quite a lot of evidence suggests that Omar Mateen did not go into that nightclub on behalf of ISIS, he went into that nightclub to punish those within for feeling free to embrace who they were without shame.
Something he was clearly incapable of doing.
That is NOT Islamic terrorism, if anything it is something even more disturbing.
Source http://ift.tt/1PuwQAt
