When 29-year-old Omar Mateen, a native-born American of Afghan descent, got home one night and discovered that his wife had failed to do the laundry, he beat her mercilessly. What kind of man are we looking at here?
We’re looking at a man with thwarted ambitions, hollowed-out self-definitions and a distorted view of the world — probably overly insecure and self-hating — who, one moonless night, at 2 a.m., will take the pathology he is possessed of to a lunatic extreme and assault not just one individual but a whole group, and do it without blinking, because in that person’s mind his victims that night at the Pulse Club, all the 49 dead and the dozens wounded, were mere objects, human beings shorn of their humanity.
Look, Omar Mateen was not the product of Daesh’s ideology, his immigrant family’s values, his Afghan archetypal roots, or even American political culture, but of the universal model of estrangement we find in disturbed people in all societies anywhere around the world. And Mateen, the worst mass killer in US history, was a true sicko of the worst kind.
What a mass shooter, whether we encounter him in Orlando or Paris, San Bernardino or London, Brussels or Madrid, gets out of a mass shooting is sway, power, dominance (personality traits he intrinsically lacks), a sense of ascendance over his demons of insecurity. It was Mateen’s disturbed mind, not his religion, his ethnicity or his class, that triggered his criminal act.
To their credit, most Americans, from the President on down, refused to pander to base, Islamophobic rhetoric. Not Donald Trump, the vulgarian tycoon from New York and now the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the US (he is that, and we have to get used to it!) who was not above using the tragedy in Orlando to further his political ambitions, descending, in the words of an editorial in the Washington Post last Tuesday, “to a new low of bigotry, fear-mongering and conspiracy-peddling,” as he libeled American Muslims (all 3.3 million of them) by accusing them of indirect complicity in the slaughter.
“The Muslims have to work with us,” he said. “They know what’s going on. They know that (the Orlando shooter) was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.”
As if in response, the Post editorial continued: “The following shouldn’t have to be repeated, but Mr. Trump makes it necessary. Most American Muslims are as patriotic and law-abiding as most American Christians, Jews and Hindus. Many have fought for and are fighting for the US in dangerous theaters far away. To generalize as Mr. Trump does about ‘the Muslims’ is to set the nation down a dangerous road ...”
And President Obama, from the outset, set the tone when he calmly addressed himself to the tragedy. “What is clear is that (Mateen) was a person filled with hate. In the coming days, we’ll uncover why and how this happened, and we’ll go wherever the facts take us.” What else is there to say?
We’re looking at a man with thwarted ambitions, hollowed-out self-definitions and a distorted view of the world — probably overly insecure and self-hating — who, one moonless night, at 2 a.m., will take the pathology he is possessed of to a lunatic extreme and assault not just one individual but a whole group, and do it without blinking, because in that person’s mind his victims that night at the Pulse Club, all the 49 dead and the dozens wounded, were mere objects, human beings shorn of their humanity.
Look, Omar Mateen was not the product of Daesh’s ideology, his immigrant family’s values, his Afghan archetypal roots, or even American political culture, but of the universal model of estrangement we find in disturbed people in all societies anywhere around the world. And Mateen, the worst mass killer in US history, was a true sicko of the worst kind.
What a mass shooter, whether we encounter him in Orlando or Paris, San Bernardino or London, Brussels or Madrid, gets out of a mass shooting is sway, power, dominance (personality traits he intrinsically lacks), a sense of ascendance over his demons of insecurity. It was Mateen’s disturbed mind, not his religion, his ethnicity or his class, that triggered his criminal act.
To their credit, most Americans, from the President on down, refused to pander to base, Islamophobic rhetoric. Not Donald Trump, the vulgarian tycoon from New York and now the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the US (he is that, and we have to get used to it!) who was not above using the tragedy in Orlando to further his political ambitions, descending, in the words of an editorial in the Washington Post last Tuesday, “to a new low of bigotry, fear-mongering and conspiracy-peddling,” as he libeled American Muslims (all 3.3 million of them) by accusing them of indirect complicity in the slaughter.
“The Muslims have to work with us,” he said. “They know what’s going on. They know that (the Orlando shooter) was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.”
As if in response, the Post editorial continued: “The following shouldn’t have to be repeated, but Mr. Trump makes it necessary. Most American Muslims are as patriotic and law-abiding as most American Christians, Jews and Hindus. Many have fought for and are fighting for the US in dangerous theaters far away. To generalize as Mr. Trump does about ‘the Muslims’ is to set the nation down a dangerous road ...”
And President Obama, from the outset, set the tone when he calmly addressed himself to the tragedy. “What is clear is that (Mateen) was a person filled with hate. In the coming days, we’ll uncover why and how this happened, and we’ll go wherever the facts take us.” What else is there to say?
