New Revelations About Pulse Nightclub Shooting Highlight Everything Sick About America
"But the Orlando massacre was certainly a hate crime, a bias-motivated attack aimed directly at the LGBTQ community for whom Pulse was a safe home and place of celebration," said MSNBC after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in an article titled "Why calling the Orlando shooting a hate crime matters: analysis".
A narrative was being spread throughout mainstream media like wildfire.
"Was Orlando shooting terror or homophobia? Yes.", claimed a CNN headline.
"ISIL or not, Orlando shooting was hate crime against LGBT people," chirped another by USA Today.
"Orlando nightclub gunman remembered as abusive, homophobic and racist," added another header from the LA Times.
The Daily Beast published a story with the header and sub-header, "Omar Mateen Committed LGBT Mass Murder. We Must Confront That. - The media and politicians are in retreat from calling Omar Mateen’s massacre an act of anti-LGBT hate. Especially in Pride month, this erasure must not happen."
"ORLANDO SHOOTING: HATE CRIME BY A LONE WOLF RATHER THAN ISIS-LED ATTACK," blared Newsweek.
"Orlando Attack Roils Gay Community, Painfully Accustomed to Violence," added the New York Times.
"Call the Orlando massacre a hate crime: This was an attack on the LGBT community—and that matters," said Salon.
"The Orlando Shootings Were Homophobic Terrorism, Whether You Like to Admit That or Not," added the Huffington Post.
This narrative handed a perfect talking point to the Republicans, who hastened to paint Trump as a protector of the LGBT community while Crooked Hillary tries to let more gay-killing Muslims into the country.
"Thank you to the LGBT community!" Trump tweeted shortly after the shooting. "I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs."
"Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist," Trump said during the Republican National Convention. "This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBT community. As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology."
This hand-gifted counter-narrative against accusations of homophobia culminated in a widely-circulated photo op a week before the election featuring Trump posing with an upside-down rainbow flag handed to him by a conveniently placed audience member with "LGBTs for TRUMP" written on it in sharpie.
The far left jumped in to counter these Islamophobic takes with its own arguments imploring everyone to focus on homophobia and not Muslim violence in the wake of the attack, with everywhere from SocialistWorker.org to Green Left Weekly getting in on the action with headlines like "Letter from the US: Homophobia behind Orlando killings, not 'Islamic terrorism'" and "Don't turn homophobia into Islamophobia".
So who was right?
None of them were. It was all pure bullshit.
A recent Intercept report by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain documents how there was never any real evidence that Omar Mateen was motivated by homophobia to kill 50 people at a gay nightclub on June 12, 2016, and how new evidence in the trial of Mateen's wife has emerged which almost certainly disproves that narrative. Though to this day that remains a widespread belief about his motives, Mateen had no idea Pulse was a gay nightclub, did not select it as a target for that reason, and had never expressed homophobic sentiments to people who knew him.
What actually motivated Mateen? Same thing that motivates most Muslim terrorists: western warmongering. Which he himself said at the time.
“Because you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people,” Mateen said during a call to 911. "What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. … You need to stop the U.S. airstrikes. They need to stop the U.S. airstrikes, OK? . … This went down, a lot of innocent women and children are getting killed in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, OK?"
But US media didn't want anyone to focus on that as Mateen's motive for the attack. They wanted everyone to focus on homophobia instead.
Demonstrations against hate crimes targeting the LGBT community took place around the world, and gay pride colors lit landmarks everywhere from the Eiffel Tower to the One World Trade Center spire to the Tel Aviv City Hall to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge as public attention was conveniently paced away from yet another reminder that the "war on terror" creates more terrorists than it kills as people in Muslim majority countries watch their mothers, fathers, sons and daughters ripped to pieces by explosives dropped from the sky. Obama condemned the attack as "an act of hate" while continuing the unprecedented drone warfare campaign which actually caused it.
This is everything that is sick about western culture in general and the US in particular. It doesn't matter that my government is filling the skies of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet with flying death machines, because I have a rainbow flag bumper sticker on my car. I don't care that Trump is continuing and expanding on all of Bush and Obama's most bloodthirsty agendas, I care that he said "shit hole countries". Cluster bomb whomever you please, western war machine, just as long as you are careful to call them all by their preferred gender pronouns.
Of course it was reasonable for there to be an outpouring of support for the LGBT community following an attack on a gay nightclub, just as it would be for any tragedy that impacted members of any other disadvantaged group. But to deliberately paint the attack as a hate crime committed by a homophobic Muslim who wanted to kill gay people despite there being no solid evidence for that narrative from day one was wrong, and to do it to distract from his obvious actual motives was downright evil.
The so-called "war on terror" goes completely unquestioned by the establishment propaganda machine because it is a foundational element of the empire it serves. By securing the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists after September 11, the empire has been able to legally expand the presence of the US war machine into any region it wants by simply flooding the area with terrorists. All it took was the destabilization caused by Bush's wars to create a chaotic environment ripe for exploitation and manipulation by operations from the CIA, Mossad, and other allied intelligence agencies, and now any disobedient leader in the region like Gaddafi or Assad can be attacked by western-backed terrorist forces with the assistance of NATO troops.
The empire's most revolutionary military innovation in recent years hasn't come in the form of a new kind of bomb or helicopter, but in the vastly increased ability to use extremist factions in conjunction with psyops and propaganda to destroy and destabilize entire regions in a very targeted way. That combined with America's AUMF and drone program has served as the perfect workaround for the increasing discomfort the US public has been having with flag-draped coffins being carted out of airplanes in the name of spreading freedom and democracy. Replace the US troops with terrorists and flying death robots, and the only people getting killed are poor brown-skinned strangers you never have to think about in countries you'll never visit.
The "war on terror" has never been about fighting terrorism, it has been about creating and inflicting terrorism.
Remember, the most powerful among us will have the most advanced and well-funded manipulations, and the best manipulators will dress savagery and psychopathy up as high-minded social justice issues and enlightened progressive values. It will never come out and say "Evil is great! Let's go kill people," it will make a great big show of defending oppressed minorities and opposing bigotry while slyly having you sign off on acts of murder and mayhem hidden in the small print. The smiling face of establishment politics would distract you with a feel-good self-righteous rainbow flag-waving orgy to keep you from thinking about how your government is creating and inflicting terrorism upon the world in order to advance geopolitical agendas in strategic regions. But feeling good is a very different thing from being good.
May the world focus less on feeling good and more on being good, less on fake virtue signaling demonstrations and more on actually fighting the powerful for the benefit of the defenseless, less on appearing politically correct and more on ripping apart the oppression machine itself. May we act less in a way which does not even inconvenience the elites who rule over us, and more in a way that worries them. Please and thank you.
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Caitlin, thank you for calling out this bullshit....All of these carefully constructed propaganda outfits use this psychological warfare, to deliberately mislead and downright lie about so many of these events, so they can then use them to mobilise the public's emotions to justify and even get consent to ratchet up more war propaganda.
Thanks for this. As always, provocative. But in this case, I disagree.
"What actually motivated Mateen? Same thing that motivates most Muslim terrorists: western warmongering."
This is a common mistake. For example, the idea that Osama bin Laden wanted to get revenge on the US for its first intervention in Iraq, in 1990. It's not quite that simple. After Iraq's annexation of Kuwait, bin Laden offered the Saudi government to recruit an army of Muslims to fight Saddam Hussein if they'd help him, according to Jason Burke's book on al-Qaeda. He turned against them when they turned him down, and instead, invited American boots onto holy Saudi soil. That was always one of his main gripes against the USA, one of the factors leading to September 11th 2001, which was not an anti-war protest.
As for the Orlando killer, he is a Muslim whose father supports the Taliban - of course he was raised to be homophobic, in America, so he knows what a rainbow flag means, and there was one outside the Pulse nightclub. His father disagrees with murdering gays - he says it's for God to punish them - this is a tactical dispute within Islam.
This article is correct to denounce "western warmongering" which kills far more people than Islamic terrorism, and the trivial obsessions of the p.c. left. But its effort to disassociate Islam and homophobia is p.c. too.
https://www.amazon.com/Al-Qaeda-True-Story-Radical-Islam/dp/1850436665/
Bought the official 911 conspiracy theory hook, line and sinker, didn't we?
No, I take a scientific approach. It's "what is the most parsimonious explanation of the known data?". Such as the data in Burke's book. It rejects "begging the question" fallacies, such as the 9/11 truther pseudo-theories.
another fake phony hoax event only the blind and gullible are taken in by. any serious examination of the footage will show smiling crisis actors and no real wounded or dead. the telescreen has you.
excellent article. i agree completely and express much of what you just shared.. though to a much smaller audience. :P thank you for using your voice. i always look forward to reading what you have to say.
Thought provoking... Resteemed! We need more people like you looking into things and pulling back the veil the media puts on these cases. Well done!
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
If the people know that it's about our war markets then taking away our freedoms was for nothing and the terrorists win again. We need guns in schools and more domestic spying. And !@#$ Russia.
If you see something say something.
Oh, and we're building a Wall that Putin is going to ask us to tear down.
Thanks Caity! Shared on Twitter ✌🏼😘
The argument seems to be that the media, led my key government officials, deceptively promoted a gay narrative over an avenging angel/aggrieved national narrative. That the text of the 911 call was neglected in the reports seems an unforgivable oversight, unless the rationale was that, by publicizing the shooter’s real intentions, it might honor the shooter and provide a pretext for others like-minded to continue the work. So, if you believe in the legitimacy of the State — a pretext we can assume most mainstream media share with their elected and appointed officials — then the deception was de rigueur. What’s interesting about this incident, though, is the point of deflection. Is the demi-monde being used deliberately to distract from what would otherwise be genuine political issues?
I am reminded here of Aldus Huxley, who wrote in the preface to the Second Edition of Brave New World, “As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.”
While I appreciate your augmenting and polemicizing Greenwald’s reporting, I’m afraid, “This is everything that is sick about western culture in general and the US in particular” may be too vague. I want to stop where the shooter did, with Iraq & Syria. Syria has been decimated by proxy to deprive Iran of an ally (when Iran itself is finally targeted). Lebanon, Iraq and Libya have all been rended asunder to make way for a Greater Israel. They have been destroyed systematically. The deconstructed region was to feature sectarian non-secular Statelets which would have in common antipathy for their neighbors, and Tel Aviv as an entrepôt.
The way to fight this is through BDS. No matter how bleak the scenario seems Stateside, it is bleaker still in Gaza. With Israel boycotted, divested from, and sanctioned, there would be no need for further funding of anti-Assad and other destabilization forces, and no need for U.S. airstrikes.