The Chris Moeller Archives

How life is like the war on terror

I had a classmate in school that participated in many of the same sports I did. He was the overly-dramatic sort and I remember he would get very angry at the players for the high school that was our chief rival. We were the Benton Community Bobcats, and they were the Vinton-Shellsburg Vikings. I mean he really took that rivalry to heart. I remember thinking at the time that if there was a guy like him going to school at Vinton, and there probably was, those two would hate each other. Their pride in their separate schools fated them to remain apart socially, but they were really the same guy. Couldn’t they see that?

My ego allowed me to believe that if there was a guy exactly like me at Vinton, the two of us would get along famously. I would love to chat the guy up at first base or while somebody shot free throws, maybe we'd compare hair care products. Everyone in the bleachers could see how gloriously chummy we were despite the fact we wore different colors. I still fancy myself as that person, and I’m now going to clumsily connect this concept to the mass shooting in Orlando early Sunday and to the “war on terror” in general.

Isn’t it weird how somebody can be raised to adulthood in, let’s say, Pakistan, under the rules and customs of a certain religion, and be precisely certain that his religious instruction is correct, believing as he does that it answers to the great uncertainties in life about right and wrong and moral purpose? And then a guy can be brought up the exact same way, but in a different religion, in, say, Oklahoma? The two men see themselves as exact opposites because each believes their own religion to be fundamentally correct and the other’s to be an apostasy.

It’s taken a couple days to decipher who the hell Omar Mateen was, but we know a lot more about him on Tuesday than we did on Sunday. Vital testimony has now been given by some of his acquaintances, yet it has, thus far, been strangely ignored by the media. We now know there are viable witness claims that the man was a closeted, shame-filled gay man. He had used a gay dating app on his phone, and had been present multiple times for the course of a year at the same club in Orlando that he would eventually riddle with automated bullets. One man claims he was asked out on a date several times by Mateen, and the ex-wife confirms the killer's homosexuality as well. His father does not, but then he’s likely a major player in establishing Mateen’s spiral of shame in regards to his sexual desires. I'm stereotyping his culture here, but I'm comfortable doing it.

Both major party presidential candidates have used Mateen's violent attack as an excuse to advocate escalating our war with ISIS, but the shooter had no operational links to ISIS as far as anyone can tell. He was inspired by them, but you can’t go to war with every entity that inspires violence. You can’t, right? Hillary and Donald, this question is for you.

We now see the profile developing of the man who despised himself for being gay, whose father’s first report of his son after the killing described a man set to violence by the sight of “two men kissing,” a man that drank heavily, violently assaulted his wives and partners, but was also frequenting, in the months leading up to the attack, this gay club that would become the target of his act of terror. He declared his allegiance to ISIS in a 9-1-1 call during his standoff with police, but he worked security for a major global security firm, G4S, and a “selfie” taken by Mateen features him wearing a New York Police Department t-shirt. Might this not be a man, a victim of bipolar disorder, and threatened to his core by sexual urges he believed to be perverse, attempting to re-establish his manhood in the eyes of the public during his act of suicide by lashing out against that which he fears most and claiming affiliation with a group of religious terrorists committed to restoring ancient law to the world.

Mateen had recently declared his allegiance to Islamic military organizations that are mortal enemies of ISIS-- Hezbollah in Lebanon and al Qaeda in Syria. So we've got some inconsistency as well. It would certainly be inaccurate to say that the attack wasn't connected to the man’s religious beliefs. Homophobia has a primary residence there. But you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that the impulses he was acting on are exclusive to his particular religion. Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal all attended an event in Des Moines last year sponsored by a "Kill the Gays" advocate. When one of their lunatics shoots up an abortion clinic, we don't bomb the Vatican. Mateen was motivated by the preservation of his own individual identity, not by service to any group agenda. He was a soldier for nobody but himself.

Our leaders, unfortunately, have reaffirmed that they are committed to continuing the U.S. military assaults that drive recruiting for extremist organizations. They apparently want for Syria what we have already delivered for Iraq and Libya. Curiously, they want to give ISIS leaders exactly what they most desire, even though this attack stumbled into their lap and they’ll probably want to distance themselves from Mateen as soon as they receive confirmation that he was a queer.

These killers are frighteningly capable of coming from almost any direction. The next mass killer, though, might claim his loyalty is to Operation Rescue, the Likud Party, or even the United States Central Intelligence Agency. These groups consider themselves enemies of militant Islam in the grand battle, but to many of us, they're the same. They promise to fight and destroy the other side on our behalf, but, in truth, we need protection from the lot of them. The rest of us can get along with each other just fine.

posted by CM @ 6:52 PM