[shockedcanadian]

The fact that it was a gay club, just confirms the mans hate and his perverted following of his faith. He was looking for a soft target in which he could kill a bunch of Americans, and he figured he could go a step further in following his faith to the "letter to the law" by targeting a location in which people engaged in behaviour unacceptable to him. Gay, drinking alcohol and enjoying themselves.

I keep listening to people making excuses and it boggles the mind. Look at some of the twitter postings on here on the side panel. The message from apologists seemed to be, "this was a hate crime". Have you not read that ISIS took claim and he purposely and methodically contacted the FBI (as they are apt to do per their M.O) telling them he was engaging in terror in their name? It was a terror attack, plain and simple.

Of course this isn't all of Islam, why take an absurd absolutist view on this topic and sprout it out with some sort of intellectual superiority? It's a method meant to confuse the facts and create doubt about the reality. Ironically most of these apologists are relativists on other subjects. If a Christian "extremist" doesn't agree with ones choices, they refuse to serve you, this guy decided to gun down 100's of people. Is this one of those "words hurt as much as stones" kind of argument?

By the way, I have always stated it's not all of Islam, and I firmly believe we have to embrace those of Islamic faith. However, when radical Islamic attacks occur, let's call it what it is. These people are the anomaly, but they exist.

[andyt]

Is splitting hairs ever whether this is a hate crime or a terror crime really fruitful? It can't be both? In fact when is a terror crime not a hate crime - do the terrorists kill with love?

[shockedcanadian]

andyt andyt:

Is splitting hairs ever whether this is a hate crime or a terror crime really fruitful? It can't be both? In fact when is a terror crime not a hate crime - do the terrorists kill with love?

Precisely. When they attack and kill so many on a large scale, it is ALWAYS a hate crime. You don't attack innocent people going about their business without being full of hate. His hate was for Infidels and the West. He was at the very least inspired by ISIS, appears to be more than just inspiration.

[BeaverFever]

andyt andyt:

Is splitting hairs ever whether this is a hate crime or a terror crime really fruitful? It can't be both? In fact when is a terror crime not a hate crime - do the terrorists kill with love?

As a technical point, I believe terrorism is when the attacker's intent is to influence government policy, hate crimes are when the intent is to influence the targeted group, the latter specifically an attempt to intimidate members of the group from public participation.

[BeaverFever]

andyt andyt:

Is splitting hairs ever whether this is a hate crime or a terror crime really fruitful? It can't be both? In fact when is a terror crime not a hate crime - do the terrorists kill with love?

As a technical point, I believe terrorism is when the attacker's intent is to influence government policy, hate crimes are when the intent is to influence the targeted group, the latter specifically an attempt to intimidate members of the group from public participation.

[Thanos]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Thanos Thanos:

herbie herbie:

The guy was an American.
He hated gays.
He had the right to buy weapons for mass killing.
And he killed and wounded over 100 people.

Let's only discuss his religion. Nothing else is worth looking at.

Yet tens of millions of other Americans who possess the exact same firearm possessed enough moral strength to not go gun down fifty people.

HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of Muslims don't engage in terrorism but that doesn't stop you.

Hundreds of millions of them also openly support exactly what this bastard did and would like to see it happen more often.

[BRAH]

Writers of a TV series (Homeland) understand what the World is facing better than political leaders.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

Hundreds of millions of them also openly support exactly what this bastard did and would like to see it happen more often.

Hundreds of millions openly support individuals going on mass shooting sprees? I don't believe it.

[Lemmy]

Thanos Thanos:

Hundreds of millions of them also openly support exactly what this bastard did and would like to see it happen more often.

That's a big number, too big a number to be believable. Maybe if we add in the likes of non-muslim bigots and religious nutbags who support exactly what this bastard did, we'd be be closer to your wickedly exaggerated figure.

[N_Fiddledog]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

$1:

Hundreds of millions of them also openly support exactly what this bastard did and would like to see it happen more often.

Hundreds of millions openly support individuals going on mass shooting sprees? I don't believe it.

Well you'd have to get into the semantics of what we mean by "openly" and how much it matters, but let's look at the stats.

Wikipedia has them. There is a lot of them and different ways to look at them but let's just isolate the one they seem most proud of.

"A 2013 Pew Research Center poll asked Muslims around the world whether attacks on civilians were justified. Globally 72% of Muslims said violence against civilians is never justified"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_at ... _terrorism

So 28% are is some way open to the idea of violence against civilians. There are 1.5 billion muslims. My math could be bad, but isn't that 420 million muslims?

[andyt]

$1:

ISIS quick to claim responsibility but it's likely bluffing, says analyst
Early details suggest Omar Mateen was radicalized recently and might have invoked ISIS for notoriety

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/orlando-sh ... -1.3632496

[Strutz]

As always with these horrible mass shootings there are no words to adequately sum it up.

My thoughts are with the victims fighting to not be a part of the death toll and to the families and friends of all of the victims whose lives will never be the same again.

Hope the bastard rots in hell, or wherever his soul is cast.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

American culture just too difficult to change


By: Gwynne Dyer
Posted: 06/13/2016 10:53 AM | Comments: 3


"If we do not get tough and smart real fast, we are not going to have a country anymore," Donald Trump said after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando early Sunday morning.

The Donald never exaggerates. The United States is a very fragile entity, only two-and-a-bit centuries old. One more attack like Orlando — 50 dead and 53 wounded — and it’s finished.

No? That’s not what Trump meant? Then how many Orlandos would it take to destroy the United States? One a month?

That wouldn’t really do it either, because on average, about 200 Americans are killed and wounded in mass shootings every month. It has been this way for many years, and the United States is still there.

Last year, 374 mass shootings — defined as a shooting that kills or wounds four or more people — killed 475 Americans and wounded 1,870. The media go into a feeding frenzy whenever the number killed in a single incident reaches a dozen or so, but it doesn’t last long.

The politicians offer their "thoughts and prayers for the victims and their loved ones," and everybody carries on as before. After all, 200 killed and wounded each month in mass shootings isn’t all that big a number in a population of 325 million and, anyway, trying to bring in gun control is not worth the political effort. It has been tried repeatedly, and it just doesn’t work.

Indeed, the National Rifle Association may be correct in insisting that the problem is not guns, but Americans. (Their slogan is, "Guns don’t kill people; people kill people," but we all know which people they are talking about.)

Firearms are also widely available in Canada, but the Canadian gun murder rate is eight times lower. Even in countries where assault weapons are widely available (such as Switzerland and Israel, where military reservists keep their weapons at home), the firearms-related death rate is less than a third of the American rate, and mass shootings are rare.

"Violence is as American as cherry pie," as H. Rap Brown once put it, and on the whole, Americans have just decided to live with it. That’s not an entirely unreasonable decision, because changing a whole culture is hard, slow, uncertain work, and 13,286 gun deaths per year (including massacres, one-on-one killings, suicides and accidents) is only one in every 25,000 Americans.

But what about terrorism? That’s a real threat, isn’t it? Trump even tweeted that President Barack Obama should resign immediately in disgrace because he didn’t say the words "radical Islamic terrorism" out loud in his remarks following Sunday's tragedy. But it’s not even clear yet whether that’s what the Orlando horror was really about.

It’s true that the shooter, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, was born in New York to Afghan immigrant parents who raised him as a Muslim, but his ex-wife says that he wasn’t very interested in Islam. Maybe he changed after she left (he used to beat her up), but his father says the trigger for his killing spree was seeing two men kissing in public in Miami.

On the other hand, there are reports that he called 911 to declare his allegiance to Islamic State just before he started shooting, and some witnesses say he shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) as he was killing people.

Even if true, this doesn’t mean that Mateen was acting on Islamic State’s orders. IS websites do not encourage potential supporters to phone head office for instructions before going out to commit terrorist acts. Just go and do it, that’s all.

But it may also be that Mateen was acting out of a so-called "gay panic" – an extreme reaction to displays of gay affection, generally because the person is desperately suppressing such desires in himself. In that case, the whole "Islamic" thing would have been just a cover for his real motive, which he wanted to conceal.

We’ll know more later, but we may never know his motives for certain. It doesn’t much matter: people commit massacres for all sorts of bizarre reasons, and it makes no difference to the victims which particular one is driving them.

It shouldn’t make much difference to the public or the politicians either, because Mateen is just one more mass murderer among hundreds, very few of whom are Muslims. Trump and others will be pushing the "terrorism" button as hard as they can, in the hope that they can fool people into backing extreme solutions to what is really a very small problem, but that is just cynical self-interest.

So what should happen? Nothing much, really. The U.S. will go on living with the occasional mass murder because the culture is too hard to change. And terrorism — whether that's what this particular event was — will continue to be one of the (relatively minor) costs of doing business in the 21st century.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinio ... 94231.html

[martin14]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

solutions to what is really a very small problem, but that is just cynical self-interest.

Tell that to the dead and wounded in Orlando, small problem indeed.

Very poor choice of words.

[BRAH]