Five years ago today, a young man opened fire in the in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, murdering 49 people and injuring another 53. NBC News reported Thursday that the Senate voted unanimously in favor of legislation designating the site a national memorial. Almost certain to be omitted from the memorial, however, as it has been from all the coverage of the legislation, is any information about the beliefs and motivations of the attacker. This is because the killer, a Muslim named Omar Mateen, was an Islamic jihadi, and in Old Joe Biden’s handlers’ America, jihad terrorism just doesn’t exist.
Pulse was a gay club, and so the massacre has been taken for granted from the beginning as an incident of anti-gay violence, although, as Tyler O’Neil recently explained, that is not actually what it was. Nevertheless, Biden’s handlers issued a statement today doggedly assuming that the attack was targeting gays as such, and scolding us yahoos once again to go easy on the “hate”: “We must drive out hate and inequities that contribute to the epidemic of violence and murder against transgender women — especially transgender women of color. We must create a world in which our LGBTQ+ young people are loved, accepted, and feel safe in living their truth.”
This has been the Left’s line on the massacre for years. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the ACLU’s ridiculous staff attorney Chase Strangio tweeted that the massacre was the fault of conservative Christians: “You know what is gross — your thoughts and prayers and Islamophobia after you created this anti-queer climate.”
Related: Biden Twists History, Using an Islamic Terror Attack as an Excuse to Force His LGBT Agenda
All right. So “Islamophobia” and Christians are the problem, and Biden’s people want us to create a world where LGBTQ-and-all-that young people are loved and accepted. All right. Let’s create that world. Now let’s see. What might be one large belief system, followed with varying degrees of knowledge and fervor by over a billion people, that mandates the death penalty for homosexuality? No, not Christianity, despite its status as the favored whipping boy of the besotted ideologues such as Strangio and the LGBTQ-whatever lobby. While Christianity sees homosexual activity (and all sexual activity outside of a marriage between a man and a woman) as sinful, it does not call for the death of homosexuals.
The Qur’an says: “If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both. If they repent and amend, leave them alone; for Allah is Oft-returning, Most Merciful” (4:16). That seems rather mild, but there’s more. The Qur’an also depicts Allah raining down stones upon people for engaging in homosexual activity: “We also sent Lot. He said to his people: “Do you commit lewdness such as no people in creation committed before you? For you practise your lusts on men in preference to women: you are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds….And we rained down on them a shower of brimstone: Then see what was the end of those who indulged in sin and crime!” (7:80)
Muhammad makes clear that Muslims should be the executors of the wrath of Allah by killing gays. A hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done” (Abu Dawud 38:4447). And: “Stone the upper and the lower, stone them both” (Ibn Majah 3:20:2562).
Florida Senator Rick Scott (R-Romney), meanwhile, sounded all the usual platitudes about how the massacre was meant to “divide” us and we were determined to be united: “[It was] an evil act of terrorism designed to divide us as a nation and strike fear in our hearts and minds. But instead, we came together, and supported each other through heartbreak and darkness, to preserve and rebuild.”
Great, Senator! How’s this for an idea about how we can keep from being “divided”: instead of using this massacre as a vote-getting device, why not admit why it really happened, and take genuine steps to prevent it from happening again?
Omar Mateen left no doubt about his intentions. “This is Mateen,” he told the 911 operator. After some words in Arabic, he continued: “I want to let you know I’m in Orlando and I did the shooting.” Asked his name, he answered: “My name is I Pledge of Allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.” On a second call, he said: “You’re speaking to the person who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.” He also said: “My name is Islamic soldier, okay?…Call me Mujahideen, call me the Soldier of the God.”
Apparently, however, even to note the facts about Omar Mateen’s jihad attack is in itself “Islamophobic.” If the new national memorial at the Pulse nightclub makes any mention of Mateen’s statements, I’ll send Nancy Pelosi a case of Smirnoff Red Label. If that wouldn’t be “Islamophobic,” too.
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