Terror at the Disco: Why the Experts Always Come Up Empty

Perhaps it is inevitable. Every violent event on American soil involving a man of Middle Eastern descent awakens ideologues who use the tragedy to advance a political agenda. As obvious as it is to the common man that the inspiration for the attack was Islam, the finger-pointing invariably leads elsewhere. The politically correct narrative, under even the most extreme circumstances, does not permit Islam to be the culprit. For example, when Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot up an office full of his coworkers at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, last December, fingers pointed toward conservative Christians who allegedly “set him off” with incendiary comments about Islam. (These allegedly incendiary comments were never substantiated, by the way.) Then, of course, the anti-gun lobby led by President Barack Obama placed the blame on the ease of obtaining automatic weapons, despite the fact that the County of San Bernardino has one of the strictest gun-control laws in the nation. (Recall also that France, with its strict gun-control laws, was the site of another horrific terrorist attack last November that left more than one hundred and thirty dead.) Any way you look at it, even when a self-identifying Muslim man pulls the trigger, the blame is sure to fall on the big, bad conservative Christians — the perennial antagonist in the Islamophobia narrative written by Obama liberals and their sycophants.

We’ve now seen it again with Omar Mateen and the tragedy in Orlando, Florida. In case you missed it, earlier this summer Mateen stormed Pulse Orlando, a gay nightclub, where he opened fire on dancing patrons, leaving forty-nine dead and fifty-three wounded before he himself was killed. Even as the facts were flooding in about Mateen — he was a Muslim of Afghan descent, he had pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS), he regularly watched ISIS beheading videos, his Muslim wife knew he was going to carry out this savage act of terror, his Taliban-supporting father repeatedly said that gays deserved death, he threatened to kill a sheriff and his wife in 2013, and when he tried to recruit his coworkers to ISIS, they turned him in to the FBI (which dismissed their concern as Islamophobia) — the media assiduously skirted the obvious antagonism between the world of Islam and the LGBT culture that the U.S. and other Western nations have been promoting and supporting with especial rigor in recent years.

The dead and wounded in this case were primarily gay men. Omar Mateen targeted Pulse Orlando because he knew it would be filled with gay men. ISIS later praised him as a “courageous lion” for carrying out this savage act of terror. Despite unsubstantiated anecdotal reports that Mateen was himself a conflicted homosexual, the connection is obvious: Mateen targeted gays because he was inspired by Islam in general and by the work of radical Islamic terrorists in specific. Indeed, Mateen said so himself! The Orlando attack was soon followed by a jihadi threat — posted on Craigslist — of a similar mass murder of gays in San Diego, couched as an imperative of moral cleansing.

So why did President Obama begin to lay the blame on the gun-rights lobby on the very same day the tragedy took place? Why did almost everyone in the mainstream media fail to make a connection between Islam’s abhorrence of homosexuality and Mateen’s targeted attack on a gay nightclub? Why did talking heads and newspaper pundits suggest that conservative Christian values were to blame? Presumably because “Islamophobia” is considered more of a problem than jihadi terrorism, which is often treated as a figment of the imagination of people like Donald Trump. Add to that liberals’ widespread self-hatred and their hatred of conservative Christians and their values, which it is instructive to note, do not include killing people for their sexuality.