Boardman writes: "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."
President Obama. (photo: Getty)
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
Orlando 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.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
President Obama. (photo: Getty)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
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.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
