America suffered one of its worst terror attacks in history in the early morning hours of Sunday.
A gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida was targeted for slaughter in an attack that eerily resembled the Bataclan massacre in Paris. Fifty lay dead after police killed the lone gunman in a daring SWAT raid, leaving the country to ask what led to such bloodshed.
The shooter, Omar Mateen, made it pretty clear what kind of message he was sending to the world in blood. During the attack on the Pulse nightclub, he dialed 911 to pledge his allegiance to the the caliph of ISIS and demanded America stop bombing the group in Syria. He shouted “Allahu Akbark” as he was killing bar patrons.
It doesn’t take much investigation to see what motivated Mateen.
Mateen was an Islamic radical and his massacre was an act of terrorism. What his exact connections to ISIS and/or other extremist groups are still unknown. However, that doesn’t diminish what was obviously the work of a man wishing to kill in the name of jihad.
With the evidence so abundant that what happened in Orlando was another grim reminder of the threat homegrown Islamists pose to this country, it’s a little surprising what factors are being blamed for the massacre.
Namely guns and America’s own brand of homophobia.
Anytime there’s a mass shooting in the country — no matter the firearm used or the motivations behind the trigger — the Second Amendment is going to be blamed. “If only people didn’t have access to guns/these really SCARY guns, everybody could live in peace!” is the typical argument of gun control crowd in response to fatal shootings. (RELATED: Liberals Quick To Blame Guns, Not The Killer, In Orlando Terrorist Attack)
Orlando proved no exception as President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chuck Schumer and numerous others called for immediate action on restricting gun ownership. The fact the shooter used one of those dreaded assault rifles and was on a “terror watch list” provided extra fuel for the gun control crowd.
The inconvenient truth that France — a country with incredibly strict gun laws — witnessed a similar, yet deadlier attack with the same kind of firepower last November was quickly brushed under the rug.
Along with the usual debate over firearm ownership came the casting of blame on a general trend of homophobia. Lawyers for the ACLU blamed Christian conservatives for creating the hateful climate against gays which led to the massacre. Slate cast it as another in a long line of domestic attacks against gays and their hangouts, a successor to police raids on gay nightclubs in the 1960s. The Atlantic wagged its finger at Republican politicians who allegedly refused to see the terror for its anti-gay prejudice. Salon equated evangelicals with ISIS when it comes to the LGBT community.
While it’s very likely Mateen chose the gay club for slaughter because of its clientele, the reason for that hatred came from his Islamic fundamentalism — not from conservative arguments in defense of Christian bakers.
Other culprits cited in order to deflect attention from a certain Middle Eastern religion include the dubious concept of “toxic masculinity.” Since Mateen was a man who liked to work out and play with guns, which means his masculinity drove him to violence and we, as a society, need to curb that kind of behavior.
The response from the Left to this tragedy is ridiculous, but should’ve been expected. Muslims have been assigned a prominent place in the liberal coalition and anything done to upset them is avoided like the plague. Democrats won’t say “radical Islam” because it might hurt the feelings of Muslims. Progressive atheists lecture us on how ISIS isn’t really Islamic in the hope the “real” Muslims share their values. Misleading stats are charted out showing how white supremacists are the bigger terror threat whenever a jihadi strikes.
And those views, distressingly, are shared by the very people who are supposed to protect the homeland from attack. (RELATED: Did FBI Training Material Purge Cause Agency To Drop The Ball On Orlando Shooter?)
A few voices decried the rush to “politicize” the terror attack, forgetting that it’s human instinct to immediately wonder how something like this could happen and how to prevent a future occurrence. But the issues raised by the media and the Left as the causes for this tragedy are entirely misleading.
A religious ideology drove Mateen to kill just like it drove militants to kill in Paris, San Bernardino and Brussels. To blame anything else — whether it is guns or religious freedom laws — is a thickheaded deflection from the problem at hand.
As Americans, we have to own up to the grim reality that attacks like Orlando will probably become a more common occurrence. Anyone with an internet connection can get radicalized overnight. Many fear reporting the suspicious behavior of Muslims for fear of engaging in racial profiling. It happened in San Bernardino with the terrorists’ neighbors. It happened again with Mateen’s security company, who reportedly refused to fire him for threatening behavior because he was a Muslim. (RELATED: See Something, Say Something — Unless It’s ‘Racial Profiling’)
Our current strategy against terror of dropping bombs against targets in far-away lands and immigration policies that potentially let in hundreds of threats is a fool’s hope for solving the problem. Especially when we impose political correctness on how we handle the threat at home.
But when we have such foolish responses to the worst case of Islamic violence in our country since 9/11, it’s little wonder why we think it will work. And innocent Americans will have to pay the price for such poor policy in the near future.