Move over all Capone for 1929’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre that ventilated seven members of Bugs Moran’s Gang. Also, the earlier Jazz Age blood bath at Bath, Michigan, where a crazed school bomber killed 44 people.
Now, Omar Mateen, 29 year-old American-born son of Afghan immigrants, apparently infatuated with ISIS and twice under prior terrorist investigation by the FBI, has murdered 50 and injured over 100 in the most lethal single shooter outrage in U.S. history at Orlando’s Pulse gay night club. According his father, a political nutcase in his own right, his son did it—not because of religion—but he was offended by seeing two gay men kissing in front of his son. Believe this about an attack timed to coincide with both Ramadan and LGBT Pride Month—an attack taken credit for by ISIS—and I also have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
Yet amidst the carnage, Despicable Donald Trump wasted not a minute tweeting: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” Trump also wants President Obama to resign immediately for not getting in front of the FBI by labeling the Orlando attack “radical Islamic terrorism.”
This is yet another example of Trump with no shame and no decency—truly a human vulture who circles tragedies without conscience. Of course, what would his (temporary) Muslim ban—first a demand, then a “suggestion,” now apparently a demand again by Trump—have done to stop an American-born Muslim whose parents came here over three decades ago? But this doesn’t mean Trump is 100 percent wrong.
The Obama Administration, as former CIA Director James Woolsey has now said again, may have made things worse by not applying some sort of appropriate term—radical Islamic terrorism, Islamist extremism, or whatever—to prior episodes all over the Mideast including Israel, Western Europe, and several times in the U.S.
It is also true that Orlando—if it’s followed by other terrorist outrages—could pave the way for Trump’s road to the White House, despite or because of his politically heavy-handed exploitation of it.
The LGBT community deserves special time and space to mourn. Yet in due time, it needs to disassociate itself from ideologues who continue to deny that while many homophobes are also Islamophobes (this includes many of Trump’s anti-Semitic troll army), all Islamist fascists hate LGBTs the same way they hate Israel for being the only Middle East Country not to persecute LGBTs.
