The discourse on the Islamic gay terrorist in the Orlando night club is proving to be the usual Rorschach test of political beliefs: gun control, Islam, immigration, homophobia.
To those obsessed with the absence of American gun control, I have a few simple questions:
What if a man claiming to be a follower of Adolf Hitler had done the same thing, in the name of cleansing the species of decadence?
Would anyone give a damn whether he had used an AR-15 rather than a Kalashnikov? Would the issue be considered the lack of suitable gun control?
No, obviously. Gun control speaks to means but not the motivation. No amount of European gun control prevented the massacre and attacks in Paris.
And if he had turned out to be a self-conflicted gay Nazi, would it make a difference to anyone’s estimate of the man and the crime?
It would elicit the same response: deviant or minority sexuality in both Islamic and National Socialist ideologies is so savagely repressed by one’s society and one’s culture, that the incompatibility between self and ideology causes explosions of rage.
I have been appalled and amazed, even at my advanced stage of cynicism, by the extent to which the discourse is shifted by liberals to things about which nothing can really be done, such as gun control in the US, to things about which everything can be done: changing our views on the real nature of Islam.
More and more I understand what Churchill went through in the 1930s, as he railed against the Nazi menace. People in the ruling class did not want to know about Hitler. They blamed the barking dog for provoking the behaviour of the wolf pack, which was hunting the sheep in the meadow.
Certain menaces are so existential, and challenge so many assumptions of the comfortable liberal world view, that it is easier to talk about gun control than Muslim control.
Islam is not a religion; it is a totalitarian social ideology.