Even if the Orlando shooter embraced the ideology of ISIS, the pattern of his atrocity is distinctively American



Don’t let the merchants of hate and the evangelists of fear fool you. What just happened in Orlando, casting a dark shadow of grief and suffering across a spectacular summer weekend, was an American crime. It was a perfect storm of bad things in an all-too-familiar combination: easy access to firearms, untreated mental illness and a private, toxic stew of bitterness and rage. It is far more similar to the incidents in Charleston and Sandy Hook and San Bernardino (yeah, I know; I’m throwing that in deliberately) and the dozens of other mass shootings in the United States in recent decades than to the organized attacks carried out by ISIS militants in Paris last year.

If Omar Mateen swore allegiance to ISIS amid his orgy of murder I suppose we have to take him at his word. That too becomes part of the dreadful framework for this crime, the worst of its kind in American history. I’m not saying that religion is an irrelevant factor in this case, or that Mateen’s religion can be held blameless. I’m certainly not claiming that Islam, in its craziest, most inbred and most “radical” forms — there’s your mantra, Republicans! Now please shut up and go away — does not fuel bigotry, hatred and violence. But what could be more American, going back to the Salem witch trials, than deranged religious fervor?

At this moment in our history, a crazy Muslim may be more likely to commit a spectacular violent crime than a crazy Christian. It’s a fine distinction, and one liable to be proven false at almost any moment, but I don’t think the left does itself any favors by ducking that issue. That only feeds the overt Islamophobia of Donald Trump, and the more nuanced, “liberal” Islamophobia of Bill Maher or Sam Harris. But if such a distinction exists it results from complicated historical factors — and the scale by which we measure whose religion is more violent is highly subjective, to put it mildly. “Islam is creepy and Muslims freak me out” might be an understandable reaction — if we were in a second-grade class in rural Tennessee. As the dominant opinion of a significant American minority, and the position of a major-party presidential nominee, it’s nothing short of terrifying.

It may not be possible for Donald Trump to do anything so repulsive that his supporters will turn against him. But Trump’s unconcealed Twitter glee at his perception that the Orlando killings justified his constricted and hateful worldview felt like new depths of vileness and inhumanity. On a Sunday morning when the entire nation was paralyzed with shock and grief, when dozens of bodies were being carried out of that nightclub on South Orange Avenue, when parents and lovers and spouses across Central Florida were waiting to learn whether a loved one who went out to party on Saturday night was ever coming home, the Republican Party’s standard-bearer-to-be could think of nothing better to say than “I told you so.”