Hang onto your hat as you’re marking your calendar, Dear Reader. Today is a very special day indeed: I was actually right about something!
On June 12, 2016, an Islamic terrorist named Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and murdered 49 people. He then called 911 and said the following:
“I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings… I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.”
Seems cut and dried, right? Mateen told the world exactly why he did what he did. Hell, he even put it on Facebook. He wanted us all to know. He didn’t want any confusion about his motive.
But because Pulse was a gay nightclub, our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters decided that was his sole motivation. It became a “homophobic massacre” instead of an “Islamic terrorist massacre.” As if the two things are somehow mutually exclusive.
And if it was a hate crime against gays, then it must’ve been the fault of… Republicans.
Seriously. That’s what the NYT editorial board said, just days after the massacre:
While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians. Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.
The word “Republican” appears in that editorial four times. The words “ISIS,” “Islam,” and “Muslim” don’t appear at all.
Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch did her part, releasing a transcript of Mateen’s negotiations with the cops but with all references to ISIS omitted. They wouldn’t want people getting the right idea, would they? And Obama flat-out refused to admit it was an act of Islamic terror.
Their message was: “The Republicans did it. The Christians did it. The NRA did it. All the people we don’t like are at fault. Omar Mateen’s motive was what we say it was, not what he said it was.”
It only took 21 months, but now the Huffington Post is finally catching up with the rest of us who actually took Mateen at his word. In a piece titled “Everyone Got The Pulse Massacre Story Completely Wrong” — which isn’t true, because plenty of us got it completely right — Melissa Jeltsen writes:
[Mateen’s wife Noor] Salman’s trial cast doubt on everything we thought we knew about Mateen. There was no evidence he was a closeted gay man, no evidence that he was ever on Grindr. He looked at porn involving older women, but investigators who scoured Mateen’s electronic devices couldn’t find any internet history related to homosexuality. (There were daily, obsessive searches about ISIS, however.) Mateen had extramarital affairs with women, two of whom testified during the trial about his duplicitous ways.
Mateen may very well have been homophobic. He supported ISIS, after all, and his father, an FBI informant currently under criminal investigation, told NBC that his son once got angry after seeing two men kissing. But whatever his personal feelings, the overwhelming evidence suggests his attack was not motivated by it.
I encourage you to read the whole thing. But if you don’t have time, here’s the short version: As usual, the media ignored all the glaring evidence that contradicted their driving narrative. Once they decided on their angle, nothing that the rest of us did or said made a difference. Their minds were made up. That was it. End of story.
Forty-nine people were butchered that night because an Islamic terrorist thought Allah wanted it. It’s a disrespect to their memory to deny that. If you really want to mourn those people, stop lying about why they were murdered.
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