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/