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Of Mass Shootings, Mobs, Media, and Piety
Waking up to overcast
skies, pouring rain, thunder and lightning would have made me very happy if it
wasn’t for the horrific news coming in over the satellite channels. A gunman in
Orlando, Florida walked into a gay night club called Pulse yesterday and opened
fire with automatic assault weapons, leaving (as of this morning) 50 dead and
at least that many injured – some of them critically.
While I shake in my bones
and try to prevent myself from weeping, reactions around the world – in the
media, online and off, and on social networking platforms like Facebook are
following the expected set pattern. The shooter – dead from SWAT fire – was one
Omar Mateen, a 29 year old New York born Muslim of Afghan descent. He called
911 just before he started shooting and claimed allegiance to ISIS/DAESH.
As expected, all the real
issues are becoming sidelined, and the entire thing has been reduced to
“Islamic terrorism”. So, now two camps will form – online and off – amongst people
I know. One camp will, justifiably try to prevent the conversation devolving
into Islamophobia. And the other group (the more right leaning one) will try to
tell everyone who will listen how Islam is the cause for all the world’s
problems. Knowing how this will go, the gunman’s family – his father and his ex
wife – are already talking about his anger issues, his history of personal
violence, his hateful nature.
What I am seeing is
something else. I see Hate crimes, I see uncontrolled arms and ammunitions in
the hand of anyone and everyone, I see mob mentality and religious
indoctrination, I see increasing hate and bigotry. And this is not one single
incident. Let’s think about it for a minute. Taking the current media narrative
at face value, this is the worst mass shooting in US history, where a clearly
“not normal” man has killed 50 (possibly more if any of the injured die), and
injured 53. He has shattered so many lives in just a couple of hours. What are
the dynamics here? There is a hater, and a marginalized, much maligned, much
demonized community that ALL religions (yes all) see as unnatural and sinful. So,
to begin with this is an indoctrination inspired hate crime against a very
specific community. Indoctrination not of “Islam” as it will e played out in
some arenas, but of any organized religion on the planet.
Baptists churches are
coming out celebrating the shooting with messages like “God sent the shooter” –
never mind that he belongs to that hated community of Moslems who themselves
are assumed to be terrorists by default, never mind that he may have had ties
to, or at least owed allegiance to that devil the ISIS. There are hundreds of thousands of people
celebrating in tweets how someone is finally “killing the perverts instead of
innocent people”. Closer to home, I can easily think of many, many people who
feel the same way. When the Paris attacks happened, or the Charlie Hebdo
attack, social media was a mass of “je suis” and French tricolor display
pictures. Not so this time.
I can count – easily – how
many people are showing any kind of sadness, support, and solidarity. These are
all the usual suspects – out LGBT people, some left leaning, rights based
activists, allies, people who identify and pride themselves on being seen as
progressive and iconoclastic. The rest, all those people with red white and
blue display pics so recently, prefer to ignore the issue – after all it was
only a few “gays” who died. Showing solidarity with something like this might
be such a problem. What will people think, it’s an uncomfortable issue, my
religious beliefs say it’s a sin anyway, it is unnatural, etc etc. Hate crimes
are not just shootings.
And then there are the
ones secretly or not so secretly glad. And this includes all the religious
fundamentalists of ALL religions. This includes pious people who don’t see
themselves as dangerous fundamentalists but still believe they have the right
to judge and marginalize and hate people because some invisible divine being
tells them to. This includes the Christian bombers of abortion clinics, the
Christian anti LGBT groups, the Hindu cow brigade, the anti decriminalization
of IPC 377 brigade, the Imams, the Nations and peoples killing and imprisoning
and torturing people for alternative sexual and gender identities, the moral
police, the khaps, my neighbours, relatives, what have you. The common
denominator is RELIGION.
Not A religion, not some
specific “terrorist” faith that is the demon of choice for all the violence in
world today, but ALL organized religions. EVERY SINGLE systematic, organized,
perpetuated religion on the planet indoctrinates hate, indoctrinates bigotry,
indoctrinates US versus THEM, indoctrinates punishment and hellfire for THEM,
oppresses, creates sick, distorted, angry, disturbed minds. Add to that the
ease of access to automatic weapons, and it is a miracle there isn’t one mass
shooting a day. Sure, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but if this
guy had a knife, instead of an automatic weapon, think of the difference in the
headlines. If this angry, behaviourally problematic guy prone to violence had
not been told all his life – by his god/clergy/religion (insert the name of ANY
religion here) – that gay is wrong and gay people are sinners fit only for hell,
think of the difference in the headlines.
No, this is not an issue
of Islam. It is an issue of religion, guns, and hate crimes. It is an issue of
religion fostered mob mentalities; it is an issue of the biased coverage of
media; it is an issue of people incapable of seeing human beings and human
tragedy without the lens of “them” getting in the way; it is an issue of how
piety screws up basic human values; it is an issue of how human beings are
anything but humane.
