The Pulse Terror Attack Was About Islam Not Homophobia

An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters could duplicate Macbeth if given enough time. And a finite number of monkeys provided with fully licensed copies of Microsoft Word will eventually write an Avengers movie. (If they haven’t done it already.) Or pretty much anything from Disney these days.

And the Huffington Post, if given enough time, will run something worth citing. And it actually happened.

Since it’s HuffPo, the actual thrust of the article is the sheer wrongness of prosecuting Omar Mateen’s wife, but it does shoot down the persistent myth that the Pulse terror attack was about homophobia.

Salman’s trial cast doubt on everything we thought we knew about Mateen. There was no evidence he was a closeted gay man, no evidence that he was ever on Grindr. He looked at porn involving older women, but investigators who scoured Mateen’s electronic devices couldn’t find any internet history related to homosexuality. (There were daily, obsessive searches about ISIS, however.) Mateen had extramarital affairs with women, two of whom testified during the trial about his duplicitous ways…

As far as investigators could tell, Mateen had never been to Pulse before, whether as a patron or to case the nightclub. Even prosecutors acknowledged in their closing statement that Pulse was not his original target; it was the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment complex. They presented evidence demonstrating that Mateen chose Pulse randomly less than an hour before the attack. It is not clear he even knew it was a gay bar. A security guard recalled Mateen asking where all the women were, apparently in earnest, in the minutes before he began his slaughter.

It was not unreasonable to assume that Omar Mateen had deliberately targeted a gay club. But there’s no evidence that he did. There was evidence that he didn’t.

But it was the left that played up the homophobia narrative, especially by pushing the discredited claims that Mateen was gay. It wasn’t doing this to advocate for gay people, but to protect Islam. That’s why the media chose to depict Mateen as gay rather than a Muslim.

I wrote about this before.

“In the name of Allah, the merciful,” Omar Mateen told the police. “Praise be to Allah, and prayers as well as peace upon the prophet of Allah. I let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.”

Allah is missing from the hundreds of media stories about the Pulse attack which all mention homophobia. But Omar never spoke of gay people during his talks with police. He called himself an “Islamic soldier” and described the attack as revenge for the death of Abu Waheed; a senior ISIS leader.

After an initial attempt at censorship, the full transcripts of Omar Mateen’s conversations were released.

And they changed absolutely nothing. Instead the media doubled down on the whitewashing

The narrative that the writer is complaining about comes directly from the media. It tried to depict the Pulse massacre as a hate crime instead of an Islamic terror attack. It spread fake news about Mateen’s homosexuality.

And it’s still lying about what happened.