Orlando attack victims: the lives cut short in America’s deadliest shooting
Source: The Guardian:
By Sarah Lyons-Padilla, who is a research scientist at Stanford SPARQ: Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions
The evidence shows that alienating an entire religious community, as Donald Trump has done, will make us less safe. There are better ways to fight extremism
Speculation has been rife about the motives of Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old man who killed 49 and injured at least 53 in a gay nightclub in Orlando. Reports say that he called 911 to pledge his allegiance to the Islamic State shortly before opening fire.
Following an attack of this nature, we can expect two streams of reactions. President Obama, Hillary Clinton and others are of the first type, urging us to condemn retaliation against Muslims. In contrast, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is of the second, insisting that the US strictly scrutinize or even ban Muslims from entering the country.
As a result, many Americans may infer that they must make a choice: call upon the value of inclusivity and support American Muslims, or call upon the value of homeland security and take a strong stand against terrorism, and by extension, Muslims.
But my research suggests that this dichotomy is both false and dangerous, as excluding Muslims is more likely to exacerbate terrorist tendencies, while welcoming Muslims is more likely to quell radicalization.
Understanding why requires understanding what motivates someone to become a terrorist in the first place.
Many assume that people who commit terrorist attacks in the name of Islam are religious zealots. Actually, many Muslim radicals were not particularly religious at the get-go. Indeed, a substantial number of Isis sympathizers are converts to Islam – hardly lifelong devotees.
If not religion, then, what is to blame?
Researchers have long studied the motivations of terrorists, with psychologist Arie Kruglanski proposing a particularly compelling theory: people become terrorists to restore a sense of significance in their lives, a feeling that they matter. Extremist organizations like Isis are experts at giving their recruits that sense of purpose, through status, recognition, and the promise of eternal rewards in the afterlife.
My own survey work supports Kruglanski’s theory. I find that American Muslims who feel a lack of significance in their lives are more likely to support fundamentalist groups and extreme ideologies.
My research reveals one answer: the more my survey respondents felt they or other Muslims had been discriminated against, the more they reported feeling a lack of meaning in their lives. Respondents who felt culturally homeless – not really American, but also not really a part of their own cultural community – were particularly jarred by messages that they don’t belong. Yet Muslim Americans who felt well integrated in both their American and Muslim communities were more resilient in the face of discrimination.
My results are not surprising to many social scientists, who know that we humans derive a great deal of self-worth from the groups we belong to. Our groups tell us who we are and make us feel good about ourselves. But feeling like we don’t belong to any group can really rattle our sense of self.
Bringing this back to terrorism prevention: when politicians espouse anti-Muslim rhetoric and say that Americans shouldn’t trust a community of 3.3 million people, what do they expect? A few hurt feelings at the expense of protecting our homeland?
If only. When politicians propose banning Muslim travel or policing Muslim communities, and when other Americans applaud and echo these sentiments, we send the message that a) Muslims are not really Americans, and b) being Muslim is something to be ashamed of.
According to my research, this is the recipe for making American Muslims feel disenfranchised and discriminated against. We are actually planting the seeds for radicalization and essentially helping Isis recruit by fueling the narrative that the west is anti-Islam.
So, yes, I condemn Islamophobia, but not just because I think it’s morally wrong to discriminate against a religious community. I condemn Islamophobia because the evidence shows that it is only going to worsen the problem we are trying to solve. Does this mean the American government shouldn’t do something about Isis, or that American citizens shouldn’t fight homegrown terrorism? Absolutely not. But we need to reframe our approach, and realize that targeting an entire religion is not going to get us anywhere good.
Subject: Orlando Shooting
Omar Mateen, 29, seems to have deliberately targeted the venue because it was a gay club. His father said a recent incident in Miami in which a gay couple were kissing in front of his wife and son made him very angry. Omar Mateen who lives in Fort St Lucie is the shooter. He family was from Afghanistan. There is only one developed country in the world that allows civilians to buy military style automatic weapons. There is only one developed country were massacres with those type of weapons happen again and again and again.
Killing innocent peoples is nothing to do with Islam.”In Islam there is no commandment to kill people by making such allegations against them. The cartoonists had exercised their freedom of expression, and freedom of expression is totally allowed in Islam. Even during the Prophet’s time there were several instances of ridicule, however the Prophet and his Companions neither punished such persons nor asked anyone to do so. On every occasion of this kind, the Prophet’s Companions always tried to positively disseminate the message of Islam. They never tried to punish these people. The killing of those people who had published the cartoons is a gravely un-Islamic act in the name of Islam. What did killing Saddam Husain do. What did killing Osama Bin laden do? NOTHING!!!. There is a long long line of replacements. I don’t know the answers. He was asked by MI5 to join them…so you know he is working for them.
The killer is the product of western education, which makes a man stupid, selfish and corrupt. He was brought up as an American but the society considered him as a Muslim. He adopted all the evils of American culture. He suffered from identity crises and did not know where he belonged. I do not think that he could speak his read and write his mother tongue Persian or Pashto or Duree. He married twice and divorced twice just like other Americans. It is just possible that he inclined towards homosexuality. I think that this is one of the reason why he entered the Gay club for shooting the innocent.
Mateen was a mentally ill individual who committed a heinous, cowardly HATE CRIME. And now thanks to paranoid fear mongering, we are playing into Mateen’s twisted ploy to ELEVATE his snivelling sick act, transforming him and his crime into some international terror event. Mateen, knowing his country so well, has succeeded. We are turn this into something far more insidious than it really was. The act of a mad man carrying out his hatred of gays.
None of 7/7 bombers and British Muslim youths who are in Syria and Iraq are the product of Muslim schools. They are the product of British schooling which is the home of institutional racism with chicken racist native teachers. It is absurd to believe that Muslim schools, Imams and Masajid teach Muslim children anti-Semitic, homophobic and anti-western views. It is dangerously deceptive and misleading to address text books and discuss them out of their historical, cultural and linguistic context. It is not wrong to teach children that Jews are committing the same cruelty in Palestine what German did to them before or during Second World War. It is not wrong to teach children that anti-social behaviour, drinking, drugs, homosexuality, sex before marriage, teenage pregnancies and abortions are western values and Islam is against all such sins. This does not mean that Muslim schools teach children to hate westerners, Jews and homosexuals.
The British establishment is wrong in thinking that Imams are to blame for extremism. Imams are not solution to the problem for extremism. Extremism is nothing to do with Imams. Extremism is not created from abroad, it is coming from within. Britain fails to help Muslim communities feel part of British society. Race trouble is being predicted by the Daily Express, because of an ethnic boom in UK major cities. Muslim communities need imams for the solutions of their needs and demands in their own native languages. Muslim parents would like to see their children well versed in Standard English and to go for higher studies and research to serve humanity. The fact is that majority of Muslim children leave schools with low grades because monolingual teachers are not capable to teach Standard English to bilingual Muslim children.
A Muslim is a citizen of this tiny global village. He/she does not want to become notoriously monolingual Brit. None of 7/7 bombers and British Muslim youths who are in Syria and Iraq are the product of Muslim schools. They are the product of British schooling which is the home of institutional racism with chicken racist native teachers. It is absurd to believe that Muslim schools, Imams and Masajid teach Muslim children anti-Semitic, homophobic and anti-western views. It is dangerously deceptive and misleading to address text books and discuss them out of their historical, cultural and linguistic context. When a native Brit goes to Middle East, he is called a voluntary fighter. When a Muslim goes there he is called a terrorist. Double standard by the British society. Also lot of British Jews went to Israel to fight but on their return no action was taken against them.
IA
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk