The Islamist War on Gays Comes to America
Yesterday’s deadly shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando – where at least 50 people were killed – is but the latest, and most horrific, episode in the long-running Islamist war on the global LGBT community. Ever since it came to power in parts of Syria and Iraq two years ago, the Islamic State, (to which Orlando killer Omar Mateen swore fealty), has lent a cinematographic edge to its murderous hatred of homosexuality, giddily distributing worldwide images of its frequent propulsions of gay men from the rooftops of high buildings. Around the world, homosexuality is punishable by death in 10 countries, 9 of which are dominated by Islamists (the exception, Nigeria, has a strong Islamist current). The Orlando massacre was not the first Islamist attack against gays in the United States. In 2014, a man named Ali Muhammad Brown murdered a gay couple in Seattle after luring them into a rendezvous via the hook-up app Grindr. “My mission is vengeance, for the lives, millions of lives are lost every day,” he said in his confession. “All these lives are taken every single day by America, by this government. So a life for a life.”
Yet while the Islamist war on homosexuality may be unambiguous, many of my gay brothers and sisters have difficulty acknowledging the nature of the threat. Like Jews, we have a natural impulse to sympathize with other minority groups. That’s a laudable instinct. But divorced from reality and an appreciation for nuance, it can become remarkably pigheaded, not to mention suicidal. Particularly when, nearly everywhere it rules, one “minority” group (in the American context) oppresses all others.
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