America doesn’t understand Orlando shooter Omar Mateen’s motive. The New
York Times speculated that Omar was probably radicalized over the Internet,
that he was anti-gay or perhaps a frustrated self-hating gay, finally concluding
that we might never know. Many American media outlets reported that Omar was
motivated by ISIS propaganda and that he was infected by the virus of radical
Islam.
Omar was born in the U.S. and never traveled to the birthplace of his parents,
Afghanistan, which he called “my country.” I remember Afghanistan in 1975 as
a 20-year-old hitchhiking across Asia with my 19-year-old girlfriend. We roamed
that beautiful country, interacting with friendly Afghans. At the time hardly
anyone was concerned about “radical Islam.”
Soon afterwards the Soviet empire moved into Afghanistan and attempted to conquer
it. When the indomitable Afghans refused to submit, the Soviet empire soon collapsed.
In 2001 the American empire moved in and, according to Brown University’s Watson
Institute, almost
100,000 Afghani civilians have been killed, mostly by US bombs.
Being bombed is very emotional to those on the receiving end. As humans under
attack, you’re naturally motivated to retaliate. When I ventured across Vietnam
and Laos, survivors of US bombing raids told me of their fellow villagers who,
back in the 1960’s, did not know anything about a country named America or the
war beyond their hills. But these illiterate peasants were instantly radicalized
and committed to patriot resistance upon their very first sighting of US warplanes
dropping bombs on their homes and families.
Look what happened in the wake of the 9-11 attack upon the World Trade Center: thousands
of American men and women were radicalized – moved by murder from the air – after
viewing images of their homeland under attack. We Americans honor their reaction
as “patriotism.”
Americans will always remember 9-11, but curiously, we don’t expect other people
to react in a similar, visceral, patriotic way when their homelands are bombed.
President Richard Nixon discovered how to make war more palatable to American
voters. When he took office in the midst of the quagmire of the Vietnam War,
Nixon did something unprecedented in the history of war: he upped the killing
of Indochinese, but accomplished the feat with fewer US casualties. As the president
withdrew US ground troops from Vietnam, he dramatically increased the ferocity
of the air war. As Nixon slaughtered many more people than his predecessor President
Lyndon Johnson, the removal of American boots shifted the Vietnam War from the
front to the back of the American mind.
Maybe we Americans have difficulty understanding the immediate and extreme
reactions that dropping US bombs creates because our homeland has never been
…