‘A really tough day for America’

Grand understatement.

Sheila Liaugminas | Jun 14 2016 | comment

Grand understatement.

But that’s what Former Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI Danny Coulson said when a news show anchor asked his initial thoughts during the ongoing reporting of the terror attack in Orlando, Florida early Sunday, as events continued to unfold there and the events were still very fluid.

‘A really tough day for America.’ In fact, it was the worst mass shooting in American history. It was the latest attack in the war jihadists have waged on us and the rest of the world that is not them. We need, our government and the international community needs, to understand this and not use other language and excuses for it.

A terrorist who pledged allegiance to ISIS went on a rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, targeting gays. Only a day later, groups and spokespersons and leaders of organizations issued responses and statements to denounce and blame others – Christianity and ‘extreme masculinity’ among other target groups – without seeing the irony of targeting groups who were not them.

This provides us the opportunity crises usually do to pull together as a unified body of citizens, within a community and nation, and globally a union of people of goodwill, to stand for the good and resolve to remove the evil, which is at work everywhere to remove us in its path to power.

Profiles of the attacker continued to add details, including that someone who knew him said ‘he hated gays, women, blacks, Christians…’ Groups that use this attack to blame other groups in America only lend support to the terrorist group to which this attacker and the San Bernardino attackers and the Fort Hood attacker and others have done, by pledging allegiance to ISIS to destroy everyone who is not them.

The New York Times reports that

Influencing distant attackers to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State and then carry out mass murder has become a core part of the group’s propaganda over the past two years.

And how are they doing this, generating this propaganda? They are masterful at using social media to appeal to, recruit and indoctrinate young men (and women) to their ideology and militant cause.

So Charles Krauthammer has some sensible advice, directed at that fact, stated clearly and in brief:

There’s only one way to go after this, and that is the Osama bin Laden theory – and he knew about jihadism – of the strong horse and the weak horse.

I think…ultimately, the only way to decrease recruitment is not with logic, not with argument, not with really clever programmers who know how to do Twitter. It is by defeating the jihadists or showing them retreat.

These movements only grow when they have a sense of inevitability and growth. Once they’re in retreat, people stop recruiting. They’re not going to die in a suicide attack for a movement that is not advancing. And that means attacking ISIS where it is.

Showing them in retreat means changing policy to put them into retreat, then using social media to show that they’re not winning and not growing, anymore.

It’s time to make it a really tough day for the terrorists. Every attack in recent years was said to be a ‘game changer’. But it never was. It’s time for the end game now, before more mass casualties of innocent civilians, more genocide in other lands farther away, while there is new resolve.

At least 49 people at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, have been massacred by a lone wolf shooter who had pledged his allegiance to ISIS immediately before. In an election year it's a tragedy which could have immense consequences. In this issue of the newsletter we present three very different views.

Zac Alstin points out that a focus on homophobia presents gays as different and marginalised, while a focus on Islamic terrorism normalises them. Which is it to be? The editor (me) suggests that the family background of the killer should be investigated. And Sheila Liaugminas calls for a tough response to terrorism.