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 U.S. bombs.[1]
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 U.S. 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…