The basic facts of the horrific massacre in Orlando have been explained by many people before me, so I will be skipping over most of that information. This post will focus instead on the things that I think are important to bear in mind as an informed citizen when thinking about or commenting on the tragic events of this Sunday.
- We came dangerously close to another mass killing at an LGBT event in Los Angeles. A man named James Wesley Howell of Indiana was arrested early Sunday morning after being reported as a “prowler” by a someone in the neighborhood where his car was sitting. A search of his car turned up “three assault rifles, high-capacity magazines, ammunition and a 5-gallon bucket with chemicals that could be used to create an explosive device,” according to local law enforcement quoted by CNN. There are conflicting reports about whether he explicitly stated a desire during his arrest to attack the LA Pride festival. Early reports said he made such statements during his arrest, but this claim has been walked back by law enforcement. He did make clear, however, that he was going to the LA Pride event.
This should make clear to everyone that no demographic has a monopoly on terrorism, or even just homophobic terrorism. We could very easily have been looking at a totally flipped scenario whereby the Orlando assailant was stopped and the LA assailant managed to kill dozens of people. - The Orlando shooter publicly declared his allegiance to the so-called Islamic State in a 911 call mere moments before beginning the massacre. This declaration, called bayat, is how one attaches oneself to the ISIS cause and is required for ISIS support. ISIS ideology holds that because Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the current leader of ISIS) declared a Caliphate with himself as Caliph in the ISIS-occupied lands of Syria and Iraq, all “true” Muslims are required to swear allegiance to the ISIS Caliphate, as dictated by certain prophecies in Islamic holy texts. For an excellent explanation of ISIS ideology and how one attaches themselves to the ISIS mission, please read Graeme Wood’s outstanding March 2015 report in The Atlantic, What ISIS Really Wants. It is a long read, but it is essential to really understanding what ISIS and their adherents are trying to do and how they are trying to do it.
The fact that the Orlando made bayat just before carrying out the massacre tells us that this was the first formal connection he had ever made with ISIS. Unlike al-Qaeda, which was happy to essentially franchise out their terror operations to sympathizers around the world, ISIS requires that one make bayat in order to be recognized by them as a true Muslim and as a legitimate participant in ISIS’ jihad. This formal affiliation between the shooter and ISIS lasted, at most, for a few hours before the shooter was shot and killed by police.
ISIS, through their media outlets, has been more than happy to claim responsibility for the Orlando massacre. The Amaq news agency and al-Bayan radio station, both official ISIS outlets, issued statements celebrating the massacre and claiming credit for it. It is interesting to note how the al-Bayan station’s report said “Allah has enabled brother Omar Mateen, one of the soldiers of the Caliphate in America, to carry out a raid where he was able to infiltrate a Crusaders' gathering at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida.”
There are several important things to draw from the language of this statement. First, it claims Mateen as a “brother” of ISIS, indicating an official attachment between ISIS and the shooter. This means that ISIS has recognized his pledge of allegiance to the Caliphate and, by doing so, is trying to claim ownership of his deeds. However, we should also note how the statement says ‘Allah enabled’ the shooter to carry out the massacre, putting the agency for the act on the shooter and Allah, but not on ISIS. If ISIS had any actual involvement in this act, they would have claimed as such very explicitly. Instead, we can see that ISIS can only claim responsibility for the ideology and inspiration of this attack, rather than any sort of active participation. This act was planned and carried out by the assailant and the assailant alone.
It’s also worth noting how ISIS portrays the victims of the attack as “Crusaders” (and “filthy Crusaders” in the sentence following the quote). The homophobia of this attack is actually relatively understated by ISIS. I read this as an indication that ISIS sees this massacre not necessarily as an anti-gay attack in itself, but rather as an attack on something that symbolizes what they abhor in the West and what they wish to destroy--the open, free, proud expression of non-heteronormative sexuality and indulgence in carefree fun and debauchery.
This suggests to me that future ISIS-inspired attacks are likely to be directed against other symbols of what ISIS views as most evil, disgusting, and outrageous in the West--perhaps symbols of our consumerism, traditions of proud religious expression and religious plurality, and propagators of ‘blasphemy,’ immodesty, and other ‘impiety.’ - This attack is very different from the ones in Paris and Brussels in several important respects. It is important to note that the Orlando shooter did not use explosives. The attackers in Paris and Brussels used a crude, homemade explosive called triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. TATP is made from common household cleaning products and is very hard to detect because it does not contain nitrogen (like TNT, nitroglycerin, and the “fertilizer bombs” used in the Oklahoma City bombings). Our detection systems have gotten quite good at finding nitrogen-based explosives, but not so much this TATP.
One of the essential tasks of countering terrorism is denying the terrorists access to the weapons necessary to cause rapid mass death. We’ve gotten good at keeping an eye on suspicious people buying suspicious amounts of nitrogen-based explosive ingredients. We are not yet so good at monitoring suspicious people for TATP production, but the fact that TATP is very unstable makes it considerably more difficult (though obviously not impossible) for a terrorist to use it as an explosive in a terrorist attack.
This leaves us with firearms, particularly ones like the AR-15 which are explicitly designed to shoot and kill many targets quickly and with ease. It IS possible to deny terrorists access to these sorts of weapons. It is simply (and immensely frustratingly) a matter of political will.
It is also essential to note that this attack was the work of a lone individual, unlike the Paris and Brussels attacks carried out and supported by a well-integrated, well-financed, well-coordinated terrorist cell. The attackers in Paris and Brussels needed so many things to go right for them for their plans not to be noticed and foiled. They needed communities with blind eyes that would not notice their planning, murderous ambitions, and dangerous hostility towards the countries they lived in. They needed to live in a place where the locals did not have the ties, trust, and good relations with police that would have made them more likely to report suspicious behavior. They needed access to guns through secretive networks that are not well-controlled by local security services. They needed the Belgian (and to some extent the French, but mostly the Belgian) security services to be dreadfully aloof, uncoordinated, and incompetent enough to miss the red flags they put up. They needed a strong network of sympathizers and assailants who would house them, feed them, buy them burner phones, give alibis, help them acquire weapons, and help them survey targets.
These things do not exist in the United States to nearly the extent that they did in Brussels and Paris. American Muslim communities do not have the sort of alienation and distaste for their adopted homeland as do places like Molenbeek and the Muslim-majority Paris slums. Indeed, American Muslim communities have proven the single most valuable resource for our law enforcement in identifying and stopping violent extremists. A terrorist cell is much less likely to be able to find the secrecy, aloofness, and alienation that existed in the places where the Paris and Brussels attackers came from and which were essential in the Paris and Brussels attacks succeeding. Moreover, American security authorities are much more competent, coordinated, and willing to act (too willing, if you ask the families of people who allege that the FBI actively goaded their loved ones into planning terrorist attacks) than those in Belgium. The threat of intricate attacks orchestrated by organized terrorist units is a threat that the United States is well-equipped to handle. For people like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to suggest that we need to crack down on Muslim communities in order to stop these attacks, or that the Obama Administration has been grossly negligent in allowing terrorist cells to develop and successfully operate in the United States, is factually bankrupt, ignorant, racist, and actively counter-productive. Such people deserve not to be listened to, but to be shamed, condemned, and mocked. - If you take a look at the Graeme Wood report, you’ll see that part of ISIS’ strategy is to destroy the “grey space” in which Muslims and non-Muslims can co-exist. They have explicitly stated that they want to provoke reactions from the West that will turn Muslims in the West actively hostile to their adopted homelands and push them to supporting ISIS. They are actively trying to make living in the West unbearable for Muslims in the hopes that Muslims from around the world will turn to the Caliphate as their protector and legitimate source of authority. They want to enrage us. They want to provoke us. They ultimately want to goad the West into launching a massive invasion of the Middle East to defeat ISIS. ISIS believes that scriptural prophecies foretell that there will be a grand, epic, decisive battle between the ‘forces of Rome (the West)’ and the forces of Islam in a place called Dabiq, which is located near Latakia in Syria. They believe that when their forces have been routed and are on the brink of destruction in Jerusalem, the Messiah will suddenly appear and bring forth Armageddon, destroying the world as we know it and bringing about the Next World.
For Western politicians to actively indulge ISIS’ ambitions and confirm their propaganda is unconscionably stupid, counterproductive, and reckless. People like Donald Trump who appeal to the base tribalism, fear of the ‘other,’ and lust for vengeance in their populations are precisely what ISIS wants to see. ISIS wants for Muslims to suffer so much in the West that they are willing to tolerate (or even accept) ISIS as the answer. This happened already in many of the Sunni-majority parts of Iraq where the rule of the Shi’a-dominated Baghdad government became so intolerable that they were willing to tolerate being ruled by ISIS in the absence of another legitimate, Sunni-friendly authority.
What we need to do is make clear to our Muslim communities and to the Muslim world that America is a place that welcomes them and will protect them as human beings. We need to embrace our Muslim friends, family, and neighbors and grieve side-by-side with them for our loss. We need to show the world that our project of pluralistic, diverse, multiethnic, and multiconfessional democracy is possible, worth aspiring to, and the best way to go at the end of the day.
What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would Nelson Mandella do? What would Muhammad Ali do? What would Mr. Rodgers do? What can we do that our children, their children, and their children’s children will be proud of?
Let’s hope that those people would, at the very least, have our political leadership exercise some damn human decency and read a goddamn intelligence briefing.
