Orlando: Home-Grown Terror

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4692
Date Written:  2016-07-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21444

In some ways the most shocking thing about Orlando may be that it's hardly shocking at all, in context. Only the scale is unusual.

Abstract: 
-

Excerpt:

In today's America, women's health clinics, Black churches, mosques and a Jewish community center have been assaulted by terror and hate attacks. The perpetrator in almost every case is a male with some kind of individual pathology, obsessive hatred and often a violent history. That's how it’s understood when the criminal is white and drawn toward one or another neo-nazi, skinhead or racist ideology.

But when the perpetrators aren't white or Christian - e.g. the Tsarnaev brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing, Syed Farooq in San Bernardino or Omar Mateen in Orlando - it's not recognized the same way. Rather it gets portrayed as an expression of "radical Islam" penetrating our borders from outside, borne by a mythical horde of unscreened and uncontrolled Muslim immigrants.