The United States leads the world (or at least the world outside the Middle East) in mass shootings (defined as an attack in which multiple random people are shot by one or more gunmen).Most of these shootings have been carried out by deranged (or semi-deranged) loners intent on acts of revenge against society at large or against specific institutions (like a school, a workplace they were fired from, and so on) but several in recent years were carried out by Muslims claiming to be acting as soldiers in the worldwide Islamist-Jihadist war against the West and its “dupes” (aka Muslims who have not joined this jihad).
The horrific attack on a gay nightclub on Sunday the 12th of June in Orlando seems to overlap several categories (psychologically unstable attacker, Islamist motivation, homophobia (possibly allied with secret homosexuality)), and more details may emerge in the days to come. But there is no doubt about the fact that a young Muslim, born in the US and with a history of Jihadist comments (and two FBI investigations) attacked a Gay nightclub and claimed to be acting on behalf of ISIS. The following tweet pretty much sums up what we know so far:
Though I hasten to add that I personally think it would be even more accurate to say “classical shariahist Islam that endorses violence against gays motivated a possibly psychologically disturbed gunman to make use of lax gun laws for what he believed to be a Jihadist act” After all, Islam (in practice much more so than in theory) is not limited to what is in the major Shia or Sunni schools; they may all endorse violent punishment of gays, but actual practice and the beliefs of individual Muslims or of non-traditional Islamic groups can vary considerably from the shariah-ist ideal of killing gays if they are found guilty of homosexual acts. In fact, practical tolerance of homosexuality has been VERY high in the Islamicate world for centuries, with everyone from famous poets to famous caliphs and famous kings being openly or near-openly homosexual and with some areas where keeping a (usually much younger) homosexual partner is almost routine. . In fact. the Ottoman empire decriminalized homosexuality long before Great Britain did. But this does not mean that society generally accepted Gays as “normal people” in the way modern liberals consider ideal. As far as I know, public attitudes towards homosexuality remained, at a minimum derisive, and in many cases actively hostile. There is also a distinction between a “passive homosexual” (generally a term of abuse) and a “masculine” older person who has his way with effeminate adults or young male children (the second carrying much less of a stigma). In any case, the hardline theological position remained harshly homophobic and reasserts itself whenever Shariahist Islam is imposed.
https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/the-road-to-orlando-jihadist-inspired-violence-in-the-west-2012-2016 Jihadi violence against the West
http://www.wsj.com/articles/radicalization-of-islam-or-islamization-of-radicalism-1466069220
Such a large and vicious massacre has immediately energized the debate about what danger may be posed by the Muslim population as a whole or sections of the Muslim population, in Western countries? I have written before about the background to this issue, and will just copy and paste a slightly edited version of the last section here:
Can any Muslim can become radicalized and fall victim to spontaneous jihad syndrome at any time?
This is the right-wing fringe’s mirror-image of the liberal belief that Islam never causes jihad and all of it can be explained by “inequality” or “Sykes-Picot” or some such story. Both mirror-images are clearly false. The real situation is that we can look at the Muslims of the world and see several disparate groups; Shias, Ismailis and Ahmedis are outside the contemporary Sunni Jihadist universe and so are not going to spontaneously take up arms in the war between shariah-based Islam and other civilizations. They are all relatively small minorities, but they are the most obvious examples of “Muslims who will not get radicalized and join the Sunni Jihad”; foreign policy, Israel, Sykes-Picot and Picketty-inequality notwithstanding. These supposedly powerful motives for hating America will not cause these groups to go postal.
Coming to Sunni Muslims, we have a very large number who are “moderate Muslims”, which is shorthand for Muslims who do not practice or try to practice all that is in the classical shariah. Their numbers vary from country to country, but one can say with a lot of confidence that they are not spontaneous jihad material either. They can covert to jihadi Islam, but it is a slow process, and it is observable and even preventable (if they are kept away from hardline preachers). In short, they are potential recruits, but not easy or likely recruits and their recruitment is highly context-sensitive. In a setting where leaders of the community are insistent on moderation and hardline preachers are not around, they tend to stay “moderate”. But placed in and around hardline Jihadists (physically or virtually) they may convert to that ideology. In case of conversion, there are always going to be signals, but who will pick up the signals and what to do if there are signals remains unclear. This is the group the Trumpers and assorted “Islamophobes” want to do something about but it is by no means clear that anything can be done..
Then there are the shariah-compliant Muslims who believe that the Shariah’s orders for Jihad are meant for very specific situations where a Sunni state has declared Jihad and those situations (fortunately) do not exist. So they get on with life in all parts of the world. Many of them are model citizens because they avoid intoxicants, deal honestly and follow the law. A very tiny fraction of them may “radicalize” but most will not. The same applies to converts. So yes, about these (small) groups one may say “they can radicalize” , but very rarely. And even then, there are warning signs and it is never an overnight process. Finally, there are the true-believer Jihadists. They have obvious links with Jihadist schools, groups and teachers. They are small in number and they are not hard for the community to identify, if is so chooses. And they are indeed high risk. Liberals see none of them, right-wingers see too many. Both are wrong.
I guess what I am saying is that notions of Muslim hordes just waiting for a chance to attack are far outside the bounds of reality. Common sense can actually be a guide here. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and equally there is no need to be willfully blind to warning signs. Biased agenda pushers on BOTH sides of this debate have obscured common sense options. And while Liberals may underestimate or misrepresent the threat from radical Muslims, conservatives frequently generalize the threat to all Muslims.
Last but not the least, all nutcases cannot be stopped beforehand. Some surprises will always happen in a large and complex society . There is no risk-free society, with or without Muslims. But this is not World-War Three. Not in the United States. In parts of Europe the proportion of jihadists is likely higher (for various reasons, including racism and multiculturalist liberalism). Meanwhile, in the core of the Muslim world itself, all bets are off. There is no well-articulated theology of liberal Sunnism. Other organizing ideologies (like Marxism and pan-Arab nationalism) have manifestly failed. The authoritarian regimes that exist are (for now) the only game in town. These authoritarian elites, who disproportionately benefit from the modern world, impose their will using a combination of force, persuasion and foreign support. But they lack a deep legitimating ideology. This crisis of ideology is extremely serious, and it may devour some of those countries (though the survival of Jordan is a good example of the fact that even the most arbitrary modern states have more strength than we sometimes imagine). Those Muslim states that are further away from the Arab heartland (and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) may do better. They can frequently rely on other identities to maintain the legitimacy of their states and new Islams can arise in them with time. But even they will not be compltely free of Jihadist conflict. No state is completely free of conflict of course, and many conflicts unrelated to Islam or Jihad could easily kill millions and destroy whole countries. But predominantly Islamic countries do have the added burden of the conflict of Classical Islamic ideals with modern civilization (not justWestern civilization), and it will take time to resolve this conflict.
– See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/12/san-bernadino-terror-attack.html#sthash.DxJdBKHm.dpuf
http://takimag.com/article/anarchy_in_the_usa_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4BdX0x7AF
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/american-society/wages-non-judgmentalism/ Since social pressures to avoid being seen as hypercritical, paranoid, or—worst of all—bigoted are acute, and the rewards for keeping an eye out for the next terrorist plot are virtually non-existent, the vigilant are often inclined to keep their concerns to themselves.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/14/admit-it-these-terrorists-are-muslims.html
Admit It: These Terrorists Are Muslims
There’s a lot of special pleading about Orlando from Muslims and liberals. It’s time to do away with that. If not, we give the issue away to Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=K2cZ2mRWE6Q&u=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DHOx6nfzrxFc%26feature%3Dshare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om6HcUUa8DI
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/world/middleeast/man-attacks-gay-pride-marchers-in-jerusalem-for-second-time-police-say.html?_r=0
randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
Stochastic. X number of ppl marinated in scraps of ideology, some r unstable sociopaths, guns are available.
“not religious” just means not very observant or knowledgeable.. Geopolitical narrative + loyalty to tribal relign
In the West, most spontaneous jihad syndrome is combo of identity, socipathy, low IQ, geopolitcal narrative etc
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/06/12/orlando/
Making of terror:
A) biography/personality
B) beliefs/ideology
C) capacity/ability
D) oppurtunity
All of these together make a terror attack
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/12/gay-nightclub-massacre-these-are-the-victims.html
