{"id":252282,"date":"2016-06-27T05:54:38","date_gmt":"2016-06-27T05:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/omar-mateens-motive\/"},"modified":"2016-06-27T05:54:38","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T05:54:38","slug":"omar-mateens-motive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/omar-mateens-motive\/","title":{"rendered":"Omar Mateen\u2019s Motive"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

America doesn\u2019t understand Orlando shooter Omar Mateen\u2019s motive. The New
\n York Times<\/i> speculated that Omar was probably radicalized over the Internet,
\n that he was anti-gay or perhaps a frustrated self-hating gay, finally concluding
\n that we might never know. Many American media outlets reported that Omar was
\n motivated by ISIS propaganda and that he was infected by the virus of radical
\n Islam.<\/p>\n

Omar was born in the U.S. and never traveled to the birthplace of his parents,
\n Afghanistan, which he called \u201cmy country.\u201d\u00a0I remember Afghanistan in 1975 as
\n a 20-year-old hitchhiking across Asia with my 19-year-old girlfriend. We roamed
\n that beautiful country, interacting with friendly Afghans. At the time hardly
\n anyone was concerned about \u201cradical Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon afterwards the Soviet empire moved into Afghanistan and attempted to conquer
\n it. When the indomitable Afghans refused to submit, the Soviet empire soon collapsed.<\/p>\n

In 2001 the American empire moved in and, according to Brown University\u2019s Watson
\n Institute, almost
\n 100,000 Afghani civilians have been killed<\/a>, mostly by US\u00a0bombs.<\/p>\n

Being bombed is very emotional to those on the receiving end.\u00a0As humans under
\n attack, you\u2019re naturally motivated to retaliate. When I ventured across Vietnam
\n and Laos, survivors of US bombing raids told me of their fellow villagers who,
\n back in the 1960\u2019s, did not know anything about a country named America or the
\n war beyond their hills.\u00a0But these illiterate peasants were instantly radicalized
\n and committed to patriot resistance upon their very first sighting of US warplanes
\n dropping bombs on their homes and families.<\/p>\n

Look what happened in the wake of the 9-11 attack upon the World Trade Center:\u00a0thousands
\n of American men and women were radicalized \u2013 moved by murder from the air \u2013 after
\n viewing images of their homeland under attack.\u00a0We Americans honor their reaction
\n as \u201cpatriotism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans will always remember 9-11, but curiously, we don\u2019t expect other people
\n to react in a similar, visceral, patriotic way when their homelands are bombed.
\n President Richard Nixon discovered how to make war more palatable to American
\n voters. When he took office in the midst of the quagmire of the Vietnam War,
\n Nixon did something unprecedented in the history of war:\u00a0he upped the killing
\n of Indochinese, but accomplished the feat with fewer US casualties.\u00a0As the president
\n withdrew US ground troops from Vietnam, he dramatically increased the ferocity
\n of the air war.\u00a0As Nixon slaughtered many more people than his predecessor President
\n Lyndon Johnson, the removal of American boots shifted the Vietnam War from the
\n front to the back of the American mind.<\/p>\n

Maybe we Americans have difficulty understanding the immediate and extreme
\n reactions that dropping US bombs creates because our homeland has never been
\n …<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

America doesn\u2019t understand Orlando shooter Omar Mateen\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-252282","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}