Daily Times

Cashing in on tragedy is Politics 101. Following the Orlando nightclub shooting on June 12 by a disturbed Muslim man of Afghan origin that felled 49 gay men and women and injured at least 50 others, conservative politicians in America generally loathe to acknowledging Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights have hijacked the community’s trauma to nudge national talking points away from gun control and towards their favorite bogey: radical Islam.

While reticent to name LGBTs as the target of a clear hate crime dressed up as domestic terrorism, conservatives packed their Twitter and Facebook feeds with somber messages of support for the Orlando “victims and their families,” calls for a “moment of silence” for the fallen and promises to safeguard the “American way of life.” A way of life increasingly at odds with Muslims living in the US, or so Fox News would have you believe.

And yet for all this conservative pandering to left-leaning America, gay men still could not donate blood to save their friends and loved ones injured in the shooting. The law bars them from doing so. Republican presumptive nominee for president, Donald Trump, nonetheless, had a field day sneering “I told you so” after he was broadly panned by party leaders last December for proposing a temporary ban on all Muslims from entering the US. His “suggestion” followed the San Bernardino workplace massacre perpetrated by the radicalised Muslim couple of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik that left 14 dead.

Trump, who inches closer to the White House with every episode of mass murder committed by a Muslim on US soil, also ripped into President Barack Obama, demanding he “immediately resign in disgrace” if hesitant to frame the Orlando shooting as “radical Islamic terrorism.” Later, in a June 19 interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Trump repeated calls for greater scrutiny of American-Muslims, insisting “profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country.” Obama, in turn, mocked Trump for believing there was some “magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam’” that would miraculously add zip to coalition strikes against the Islamic State (IS) militants in the Middle East, and make their leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi quake in his boots.

Meanwhile, the alarming fact that a civilian like Omar Mateen, the identified shooter, could with minimal checks buy a Sig Sauer assault rifle — a “weapon of war” more suited to ambushing the Taliban than hunting deer — was deftly shunted sideways to favour the Islamic terrorism angle. Easily discarded also was the FBI’s gross negligence in keeping tabs on Mateen despite twice tagging him to terror watch-lists.

This made some pundits wonder if the Orlando attack, the worst mass shooting in the US history, was a false flag operation schemed by federal authorities to sharpen focus on Obama’s case for tighter gun control laws, a move conservatives decry as a clear violation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. If true, though, it was a masterstroke. A CBS News poll pursuant to the attack found the majority of Americans favouring a fresh ban on the sale of assault weapons to civilians.

Its founding fathers’ obsession with armed militias aside, America’s love affair with guns defies logic, especially after a February study by the American Journal of Medicine revealed that US citizens were 10 times more likely to die from firearms than anywhere else in the developed countries. The author of this study, Erin Grinshteyn, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, concluded, “These results are consistent with the hypothesis that our firearms are killing us rather
than protecting us.”

Even on June 12, a grim day for any American championing right-to-carry, there were 42 other reported shootings across 16 states that wrought 18 fatalities, including five children. Since big media was locked onto Orlando and the attacker’s alleged IS connection, these parallel incidents received little to no coverage. Which does not surprise in view of the Gun Violence Archive statistic that 38 people perish to bullets in the US on any given day. As long as they don’t clump together conspicuously, Americans seem to have developed a high tolerance for death by Smith & Wesson.

The 29-year old New York native Mateen was by all accounts an individual struggling with his latent homosexuality besides juggling other mental health issues. Witnesses who came forward after the Orlando’s carnage claim to have seen him in Pulse, the targeted nightclub, at least a few times before the shooting. Mateen is further believed to have frequented other local LGBT bars, and used gay dating apps to try to pick up men. His first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, who ostensibly knew about this secret life, filed for divorce four months
into their marriage after the physical abuse
became unbearable.

Does this man remotely sound like someone on a mission for Allah? Even the most myopic, takfiri kind pushed by puritanical Wahhabism? I don’t see it. Mateen needed psychiatric help, but somehow evaded getting flagged by his employers despite complaints from coworkers about anger management issues. FBI Director James Coney recently divulged that Mateen had, at different times, boasted of his ties to IS, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah without realising these groups were sworn enemies. So much for due diligence in the way of jihad.

Moreover, it bears remembering that Mateen’s only link to Al-Baghdadi’s men in black is the tenuous, self-confessed one courtesy of a 911 call he made in the middle of his rampage to pledge fealty to IS. It seemed almost like an afterthought, the last act of a deranged killer hoping to hog the headlines a little longer than a lone-wolf terrorist would. His father, Seddique Mateen, coincidentally a virulent Pakistan-hater, also assured reporters the shooting had “nothing to do with religion.”

This, however, did not stop Republicans in the Senate from thwarting four bills to tighten gun control laws on June 20, a move that spurred Democrats in the lower chamber to stage an unprecedented, overnight sit-in three days later. Sadly, in a fractious US election season where the divisive Trump shaved four points off rival Hillary Clinton’s double-digit lead in the polls immediately following the Orlando attack, Mateen’s jihadi delusion will cost American-Muslims dearly.

The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance journalist