In an editorial embarrassing even by the low standards by which the New York Times editorial page ought to be judged, the editorialists at the paper argue this morning that the real blame for Omar Mateen’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando lies with…America and Republican politicians.
Seriously.
Under the headline, “The Corrosive Politics that Threaten LGBT Americans”, the Times laments GOP opposition to gay marriage, “odious” Republicans’ efforts to keep transgendered Americans from using their preferred bathrooms, and, more broadly, America—a “society where hate has deep roots.”
While the editorial goes on—at considerable length—to detail the alleged bigotry of Republicans on matters of homosexuality, it fails even to mention what was indisputably a key motivation for Mateen’s killing spree: the hateful teachings of radical Islam. In fact, it’s possible to read the entire editorial and never learn that Mateen was a committed jihadist. There is no mention of the fact that Mateen pledged loyalty to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, no reporting that he admitted to co-workers he sympathized with al Qaeda terrorists, no acknowledging that he told the FBI during one of two investigations into his radicalism that he wanted to be “martyred” for his faith.
While the Times editorialists might want to believe Mateen’s motivation was unclear in order to make their preferred political arguments, Patience Carter, one of the survivors of Mateen’s attack, told reporters, “the motive was very clear to us.” On Tuesday, Carter described for reporters what she heard as the attacker spoke with authorities from a bathroom in the nightclub during a pause in his rampage. “Through the conversation with 911, he said that the reason why he was doing this was because he wanted America to stop bombing his country,” she recalled. “So, the motive was very clear to us, who were laying in our own blood and other people’s blood, who were injured, who were shot, that we knew what his motive was, and he wasn’t going to stop killing people until he was killed, until he felt like his message got out there.”
The Times writers, in their eagerness to condemn the United States and Republicans, apparently never consider that Mateen’s “hatred toward gays and lesbians” might somehow derive from the poisonous strain of Islam that calls for killing them. In a speech three years ago at a site not far from last weekend’s attack, an Islamic scholar called for killing gays. Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar, speaking at the Husseini Islamic Center in Orlando back in 2013, said of homosexuals: “Death is the sentence.”
“We have to have that compassion for people. With homosexuals, it’s the same—out of compassion. Let’s get rid of them now,” he said. Sekaleshfar, a British citizen of Iranian descent, spoke at the same Islamic center this past spring.
This is not a unique view among radical Muslims. According to the Washington Post, ten countries currently punish homosexuality by death.
In congressional testimony last year, Hossein Alizadeh, regional program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa for the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, described the situation in Iran. “Iranian officials, including former President Ahmadinejad and Iran’s current Supreme Leader, deny the existence of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people,” he said. “The criminal law notes that adult same-sex sexual acts are punishable by death.”
Indeed, there have been numerous reports in recent years about radical Islamist regimes seeking to execute gays. In 2014, the Guardian reported: “Three Iranian men have been executed after being found guilty of charges related to homosexuality, according to a semi-official news agency. The men, only identified by their initials, were hanged on Sunday in the southwestern city of Ahvaz, the capital of Iran’s Khuzestan province.” Similar reports came out of Saudi Arabia.
Jihadists hacked to death the editor of a leading magazine for gays and lesbians in Bangladesh. That attack came shortly after the killing of another gay activist in the country.
Most disturbingly, ISIS has boasted about throwing gays off of buildings to their death. This is the group to which Mateen pledged his loyalty as he slaughtered gays and lesbians in Orlando last weekend.
In the deeply warped view of the Times editorialists, the fact that Mateen embraced this worldview is irrelevant to the massacre he committed. But Ted Cruz’s opposition to gay marriage and North Carolina governor Pat McCrory’s views on bathrooms and Donald Trump’s prospective Supreme Court list have together created a “corrosive politics that threatens LGBT Americans.”
The entire editorial is an extended non-sequitur, a paroxysm of partisanship unworthy of publication in America’s paper of record—unworthy of publication, for that matter, in Salon or even the comments section of a left-wing website. It’s an utter embarrassment.
One final footnote. It’s often the case after atrocities like the one committed in Florida that partisans rush to point out the party affiliation of the attacker. I don’t find it terribly important whether an individual so deranged as to commit such a barbaric attack considers himself a Republican or Democrat. But if the goal of the Times petty editorial was to assign partisan blame for the Orlando attacks, it seems to me that the authors might have interrupted their bizarre attack on Republicans to note that for the decade before his deadly rampage, Mateen was a registered Democrat.
