RUTHFULLY YOURS

Another massacre and where to sheet the blame? Polite convention precludes making more than passing mention of the killer’s creed, while ‘too many guns’ and ‘mental illness’ are getting tired. So let’s settle on a non-specific strain of homophobia and leave the Prophet out of it
Another barbaric Islamic terrorist massacre, killing 49 people and injuring over 50 in an Orlando gay nightclub; and the heart searching begins among the mentally challenged. What drove American-born, Afghani-parented, frequent-mosque-attending, prayer-mat-toting, Omar Mateen? It is a mystery.

His ex-wife said he was mentally unstable. He apparently beat her and kept her housebound. CNN after flirting as best they could with all kinds of possibilities, including white supremacism, had a get out. Of course, it makes sense now; he was around the bend. Well, wife-beating and keeping women secluded might just be the way devout male Muslims go about their lives. Sounds crazy to us but not to an Afghani or, say, Saudi-Arabian, I dare say.

President Obama couldn’t bring himself yet again to mention Islam as being complicit, though he did manage to blame guns. Expect the gun laws in the US to get most emphasis by Democrats who are clearly oblivious to the zero correlation between worldwide terrorist attacks and gun laws. There is no accounting for sheer wilful blindness and imbecility.

Mind you it is likely that Mateen was unbalanced. I tend to think that anyone who would deliberately gun down people in a nightclub is probably deranged. But where does that get us when clearly there are so many deranged people inspired by Islamic scripture.

Wikipedia lists 220 worldwide Islamic terrorist attacks in the six years 2010 – 2015, which have received “significant press coverage.” So far 29 are listed for 2016, including the Orlando attack. Countless other less significant attacks have occurred. It is quite easy to see online estimates of over 20,000 Islamic attacks since 9/11.

These are numbers of plague proportions carried out by people who are apparently mentally unbalanced. Is it something in the water? In fact, it is something in the book. And more of us better start comprehending that before we are buried as a civilisation – the LGBT crowd among them.

It just might have been no accident that Mateen targeted a gay nightclub at the start of Ramadan. There is plenty of support in the Hadiths for killing homosexuals, including by throwing them from high buildings. Of course Islamic apologists are fond of quoting Old Testament condemnation of sodomy. I too would think this relevant if there were bodies of Jewish or Christian religious zealots who went around giving life to these passages by encouraging the killing of homosexuals. As it is, it is totally and completely irrelevant and, I suspect, deliberately deceptive and distracting.

The Orlando massacre is a hideous reminder to Americans that homophobia is an integral part of Islamic extremism. That isn’t to say that some people of other faiths and ideologies aren’t hostile to members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, community. Nor is to say that Islamic extremists don’t target other minorities, in addition to engaging in wholly indiscriminate violence. But it is important to establish why a man like Omar Mateen could be motivated to murder 49 people in a gay nightclub, interrupting the slaughter, as law-enforcement officials reported, to dial 911, proclaim his support for Islamic State and then pray to Allah.

I offer an explanation in the form of four propositions.

1. Muslim homophobia is institutionalized. Islamic law as derived from scripture, and as evolved over several centuries, not only condemns but prescribes cruel and unusual punishments for homosexuality.

2. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws that criminalize and punish homosexuals in line with Islamic law.

3. It is thus not surprising that the attitudes of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are homophobic and that many people from those countries take those attitudes with them when they migrate to the West.

4. The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened the intolerance toward homosexuality. Extremists don’t just commit violence against LGBT people. They also spread the prejudice globally by preaching that homosexuality is a disease and a crime.

Not all Muslims are homophobic. Many are gay or lesbian themselves. Some even have the courage to venture into the gender fluidity that the 21st century West has come to recognize. But these LGBT Muslims are running directly counter to their religion.

In his 2006 book “Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law,” the Dutch scholar Rudolph Peters notes that most schools of Islamic law proscribe homosexuality. They differ only on the mode of punishment. “The Malikites, the Shiites and some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites are of the opinion that the penalty is death, either by stoning (Malikites), the sword (some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites) or, at the discretion of the court, by killing the culprit in the usual manner with a sword, stoning him, throwing him from a (high) wall or burning him (Shiites).”

Under Shariah—Islamic law—those engaging in same-sex sexual acts can be sentenced to death in nearly a dozen countries or in large areas of them: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, the northern states of Nigeria, southern parts of Somalia, two provinces in Indonesia, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates. Death is also the penalty in the territories in

Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed’s vision for Saudi Arabia, the way he puts it, is as a country no longer dependent on oil; with a growing economy and transparent laws, which will consequently give it a strong position in the world.

The prince has already received negative blowback from conservative members of the Al Saud clan. They have been resistant to change in the past and may not appreciate new reforms which might threaten their authority in the country.

The status quo is that Saudis are raised with the conviction that the state will always provide for their needs, healthcare and security, in exchange for their loyalty to the ruling Al Saud clan. However, the recent oil crisis has witnessed many luxuries stripped away from the Saudi people, as the state prepared to deal with a growing budget deficit. The move to impose taxes, a concept alien to the country, is sure to create discontent among ordinary Saudi people.

Saudi Arabia, long associated with oil wealth and extravagance, has decided that time has come for it to revamp its image. Last year, King Salman, 80, ascended the Saudi throne, and since then has unleashed major reforms, introduced a more assertive domestic and foreign policy, and handed over the reins of some of the most significant posts of the Saudi leadership to a younger group of Saudi leaders.

The driving force behind these reforms is the 30-year-old deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS. Prince Mohammed’s vision for Saudi Arabia, the way he puts it, is as a country no longer dependent on oil; with a growing economy and transparent laws, which will consequently give it a strong position in the world. All of this may come across as appealing, but the ability of Prince Mohammed to deliver these reforms depends on several variables. To succeed, Prince Mohammed, although he enjoys a broad mandate, still needs the support of the rest of the country.

Shouting “Allahu akbar,” a 29-year-old American citizen with roots in Afghanistan entered a Florida nightclub at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning and committed what is being called “the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.”

Prior to slaughtering at least 50 people and seriously wounding dozens of others, Omar Mateen phoned 9-1-1 and pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Mateen had planned the massacre in advance, purposely targeting a venue known to be frequented by lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgenders — the perfect personification of liberal Western values considered abhorrent to radical Muslims, regardless of their specific jihadist affiliation.

The FBI promptly launched an investigation into the now-dead Mateen, who had been working as a security guard at G4S Secure Solutions since 2007. It quickly emerged, however, that Mateen was already on the FBI’s radar for having various ties to Islamic radicalism.

About 10 hours after the massacre, with bodies still inside The Pulse — Orlando’s self-described “premier gay nightclub” — President Barack Obama addressed the nation to condemn the horrific incident, which, surprisingly, he referred to as an act of terror. Not the least bit surprisingly, he refused to utter the word “Islamist.” Instead, he declared the perpetrator a person “filled with hate.”

On a Fox News panel in the aftermath of the bloodbath, counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka stressed the need for the White House and the world to acknowledge the clear connection between this attack and all the others with the same ideology. Linking the Fort Hood, Boston, San Bernardino, Paris and Brussels massacres, Gorka — author, most recently, of “Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War” — was the only one who mentioned Israel. The point he was making, and has been trying to hit home in his writings and lectures, is that the Islamist assault on the West is not a series of individual lone-wolf attacks, but rather a global movement, whose “propaganda by deed” is terrorism. And, he said, these recent acts, unlike the 9/11 attacks, are relatively small in scope and cheap to carry out, but nevertheless terrorize and paralyze whole cities. In other words, they get a lot of bang for their buck, both literally and figuratively.