Orlando: Obama Cried "Terror" Before He Knew Diddly

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

16 June 16

But the President was one of the saner, more decent public voices

rlando touched off the usual backflow of moral and political oral garbage that pollutes American public life, and sadly that’s no surprise. And it’s no surprise, although it always should be, that our public voices range from helpless to shrill, from limp impotence to hate-filled bigotry. It would be nice if, in the wake of the horror of the next Orlando, we could hear someone in authority somewhere say something sometime that made us proud, something that motivated us to act compassionately and rationally. But that is not where we are as a country now, and haven’t been for a long, long time, so very long that it sounds almost antique to talk today about compassion and reason, or even simple precision.

In his first comments on Orlando, President Obama promptly characterized the shooting with the demagogic red herring of “terrorism,” even though he didn’t know that, and it may not have been that in any rational sense. He certainly didn’t have to play the “terrorism” card, surely he knew others would, and he could have chosen to stand apart in thoughtful restraint. In any event, his tone was modulated and low key, even as he uttered the heedless red-flag words:

Today, as Americans, we grieve the brutal murder – a horrific massacre – of dozens of innocent people. We pray for their families, who are grasping for answers with broken hearts. We stand with the people of Orlando, who have endured a terrible attack on their city. Although it’s still early in the investigation, we know enough to say that this was an act of terror and an act of hate. And as Americans, we are united in grief, in outrage, and in resolve to defend our people….

We are still learning all the facts. This is an open investigation. We’ve reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer. The FBI is appropriately investigating this as an act of terrorism…. [Emphasis added.]

Actually, at that point and even now most likely, we do not know “that this was an act of terror” in anything like the 9/11-al Qaeda-ISIS sense of the phrase. “Terror” and “terrorism” are slippery words that ultimately carry no useful meaning, certainly not these days in the fevered dialogue of the American public sphere. In fear-drenched America, the deployment of terror-words is itself an act of verbal terrorism that, purposefully or not, makes it harder to think clearly about what is actually happening.

“Terrorism” is Orwellian language, used to make thought impossible

Orlando was an “act of terror” only in the generic sense, in the sense that it terrified people, and that is a meaningless truism. In the political context of today, the phrase is loaded with explosive subtext, and to use the phrase is to set it off in the minds of listeners. To what purpose does the President deploy this word-weapon from the White House? Are there not adequate equivalents in English, such as “act of hate,” that the President uses almost as an afterthought? Could he not have let it go at “brutal murder – a horrific massacre”? Could he not have used unthinkable, harrowing, unconscionable, barbaric, bloodthirsty, or any other extreme equivalent instead of the politically loaded – and essentially inaccurate – “act of terror”?

In our present context, it is fundamentally inaccurate, dishonest, demagogic to speak of an “act of terror” without specifying the actual terrorist who perpetrated it. Without some ideological context, an “act of terror” like Orlando is just mass murder, which should be bad enough to warrant our attention. (Consider: were the slaughters of native peoples at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, or elsewhere just mass murder or deliberate acts of US terrorism?) Terrorism is a tactic, often a tactic of the weaker side, though not always. Terrorism is intended to weaken and demoralize the other side, to the benefit of the terrorists. It is not known to be a reliably effective tactic. The massive terror-bombing of World War II seems mostly to have stiffened British, German, and Japanese resolve to resist – until the ultimate terror-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Terrorism in our time has rarely reached anything like the scale of carpet-bombing. Today’s terrorism is typically the drone strike, the bomb in the baby carriage, the suicide bomber – attacks that wreak carnage, to be sure, but rarely on the scale of 241 dead Marines in Beirut in 1983, or even 168 dead in Oklahoma City in 2001.

To be a meaningful “act of terrorism,” the crime must be part of some plan to achieve a larger end. In this sense serial killer Ted Bundy was terrifying, but not a terrorist, while Charles Manson’s delusional apocalypticism qualifies him as at best a borderline terrorist; unfortunately, real terrorists can be both sane and rational in at least some of their behavior, as illustrated by Menachem Begin, Ho Chi Minh, Houari Boumediene, Osama bin Laden, and others. In the full context of history, however, terrorism has been less useful to oppressed people than to ruthless governments (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Andrew Jackson, and their ilk). And it’s often useful for government to fearmonger its citizens with the threat of “terror” from the likes of Omar Mateen, thereby distracting from the government’s own, greater terror campaigns (years of drone war, years of night raids in Afghanistan, over a year of genocidal war in Yemen, for a few examples).

Omar Mateen’s profile: American, Democrat, divorced, father …

If Omar Mateen is a terrorist at all, the evidence so far puts him at the Charles Manson end of the terrorist spectrum. Mateen was a 29-year-old New Yorker, a registered Democrat, an American citizen born to naturalized Americans of Afghan birth. He lived in Fort Pierce, about an hour away from Orlando. He worked as a security guard for G4S, the world’s largest global security firm, headquartered in Britain, with more than 610,000 employees in 110 countries worldwide. G4S screened Mateen when it hired him in 2007. G4S screened Mateen again in 2013, after learning that the FBI had investigated (and cleared) him. Mateen had claimed to have ties both to the Shiite Hezbollah and the Sunni al Qaeda. G4S says now that it did not know of the 2014 FBI investigation that also cleared Mateen. In 2011 and 2012 he made pilgrimages to Mecca.

He met his first wife, Sitora Ali YuSufi, on Myspace in 2008. They married in early 2009. She had left her native Uzbekistan when she was 11, as she wrote in a blog post: “Thanks to my father I spent a lot of my childhood traveling, attending private schools and fluently speaking 5 languages by the age of 8.” With help from her parents, she fled his company in August 2009, after three months of marriage (they divorced in 2011). She has an active online presence, saying now that he beat her then. She also says now that she believed then that he was gay, an opinion now being reinforced by several Mateen acquaintances in the LGBT community going back to 2006.

His current wife, Noor Zahi Salman, 30, is of Palestinian descent and grew up in a Muslim family that would not allow her to drive. She may have married Mateen in 2013, and they have a three-year-old son. She is reportedly cooperating with the FBI, whose anonymous leaks suggest she helped Mateen buy ammunition, that she drove him to the Pulse nightclub on occasion, and that she tried to talk him out of attacking it. Salman’s online presence has been largely scrubbed. Reportedly, Salman had separated from Mateen and moved in with her parents in Rodeo, California, in December 2015, but subsequently returned to Florida. The FBI maintains pressure on her in part by anonymously briefing reporters that she could be arrested for knowing about a crime in advance and not reporting it – not that they’re accusing her, they’re just sayin’.

The only apparently credible, albeit remote tie between Mateen and ISIS is an alleged 911 call he made the night of the shooting, during which he supposedly pledged some sort of allegiance to ISIS. No 911 tape has been made public. Mateen’s father observed that Mateen showed no signs of being radicalized, by the way he talked, by the way he dressed, or by growing a beard. The President and the FBI continue to search for that needle in the haystack of Mateen’s life.

Only one of Mateen’s former co-workers, Daniel Gilroy, has come forward in public. Gilroy, 44, a retired policeman, worked with Mateen at G4S, which assigned them to gate duty at a low security PGA Village. Gilroy calls Mateen “very racist, very sexist.” Gilroy says he complained multiple times about Mateen being dangerous, but nothing came of his complaints. Gilroy says he quit his job when Mateen “became obsessed” and started harassing him with more than 20 text messages and a dozen phone calls daily. These have not been made public.

Almost no credible evidence that Omar Mateen was an Islamic radical

Whatever his complexities, Omar Mateen was together enough to hold a security guard job with an international company for almost a decade. He was together enough to pass that company’s screenings as well as two FBI investigations. He was together enough to entice two attractive women to marry him. He was together enough to make two pilgrimages to Mecca and to practice his Muslim faith at least minimally. He was together enough that the FBI didn’t even try to entrap him (so far as we know).

Compared to scant evidence that he was a terrorist, the evidence that Omar Mateen was a closeted homosexual is compelling, albeit circumstantial. Numerous people have come forward to say that Mateen frequently attended Pulse, that he drank heavily and alone, that he used gay dating apps, that he frequented other gay clubs, that he flirted with other gay men, that he had gay friends, and so on. His ex-wife said he might be gay, his father insisted he was not gay. If this is true, if Omar Mateen was a closeted gay man, his apparently mixed persona makes sense – if that was who he really was, it was an offense to his religion and his Afghan culture. He had no easy way out. So he committed a hate crime. And it may also have been a self-hate crime.

The Orlando massacre was so obviously, so primally a hate crime against the LGBT community that the President and others seem almost willfully stupid in their efforts to make it somehow more about something else. Islamic terrorism is nowhere near as big a threat as good old American bigotry. Being gay or black or Latino or any number of ethnic/cultural minorities in America today is to be widely despised in America. Being poor or old or young in America today is to be widely despised in America. Americans increasingly despise each other and rally around the figureheads who bless their particular bigotries and sanctify their own murderous impulses (abortion clinic bombers and doctor assassins are real American terrorists, almost never called by their rightful name).

Even though the President misled the country with his reflexive terrorist baiting, he also spoke eloquently and sympathetically about the gay community. And he again called for controlling automatic assault weapons for the general public, albeit with comments that sounded more like resignation than a call to serious action. Twenty years ago, Australia had a mass shooting problem. Australia banned assault weapons. It worked, and Australia has had no mass shootings since 1996. What makes Americans so much more stupid than Australians?

Some of us don’t see mass shootings of LGBT people as a problem. Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California, told his congregation on the night after the shootings that Christians “shouldn’t be mourning the death of 50 sodomites…. The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is – I’m kind of upset that he didn’t finish the job!”

Florida governor Rick Scott was quick to join the “terror” demagoguery, but his only response to the massacre was that everybody go pray. This has long been a popular political evasion, especially given its demonstrable ineffectiveness, but it helps people, especially Republicans, feel sanctimonious while actually taking no responsibility for solving the problem. Demonstrating his level of empathy and compassion, Scott also refused to acknowledge that the LGBT community had been targeted. Asked what to do to help the victims, Scott told CNN: "Just pray. Pray for the victims, pray for their families, pray that this never happens again."

In mid-May, Rush Limbaugh was talking up a new tactic for Christian bigotry for small business owners: “Instead of telling the gay couple that you refuse to bake the cake for their wedding because you disapprove of homosexuality, you should now say you are not going to bake a cake for the gay wedding because you fear Muslim backlash. Or, due to your respect of Islam, you cannot bake a cake for a gay wedding. See how that flies.”

And then there’s Donald Trump, calling for banning Muslims coming into the US – only Mateen was born here, so that wouldn’t work unless it were somehow made retroactive and people had to be removed because of where they came from and what was done there. For example, using Trumpery logic, both of Trump’s parents came from Germany, so we need to deport Trump now to protect ourselves from the threat of an American Holocaust. That should work.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.