At 2 a.m. this morning, a man who law enforcement sources have identified as Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, a U.S. citizen born of Afghan parents, opened fire with an automatic weapon in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Before he was killed by police, he murdered at least 20 individuals and wounded dozens more. The death toll could rise further.
The FBI reportedly suspects that the shooter may have “leanings towards radical Islamic terrorism.” Some accounts indicate that he was, like so many so-called “lone wolves,” actually a “known wolf” – a jihadist already identified as a potential threat by authorities, but allowed to continue to operate.
Now that latitude appears to have translated into the murder and wounding of dozens of gay people, an action consistent with the teachings of the totalitarian Islamic supremacist doctrine known as sharia, which requires its adherents to hate and kill homosexuals.
A posting last night at CounterJihad.com shows that the genesis of this practice is found in a hadith which has Muhammad saying that “whomever you find doing the actions of the people of Lot, kill the one doing it, and the one it is done to.” While the authorities of Islam disagree about what is the preferred way to kill gays and lesbians – throwing them off buildings, hanging them, burning them alive – there is no question but that murdering them is sanctioned by sharia.
As it happens, in 2013, an Islamic supremacist named Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar made this point in a speech at the Husseini Islamic Center in Sanford, Florida – about 20 miles from Orlando and two hours drive from Mateen’s home in Port St. Lucie. It is unclear at this writing whether the shooter was associated with this mosque or aware of this particular exhortation to kill homosexuals. But if indeed he was a sharia-adherent Muslim, there is no doubt that he was aware that his duty was to take homophobia to its murderous extreme.
It is absolutely predictable that Muslim Brotherhood front organizations like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) will shortly denounce this act of violence, insist that it has nothing to do with Islam, and lowball any ties the perpetrator may have had to one or more Orlando area mosques. Instead, they will try to deflect attention to those they accuse of “Islamophobia” for connecting the obvious – and ominous – dots. In fact, CAIR has scheduled a press conference on Tuesday at its headquarters in Washington for the purpose of defaming American patriots who oppose the Islamist agenda and those, like the Muslim Brotherhood with its pre-violent “civilization jihad,” who are enabling violent jihadists, here and elsewhere.
The Islamic State and al Qaeda have both called for individual jihadists to use the month of Ramadan, which began on June 6th, to attack Americans in this country. This murderous act in Orlando may prove to have been inspired by such calls, or by Sheik Sekaleshfar, or simply by the tenets of sharia.
We can only hope that – whatever its inspiration – Mateen’s is the last such act of jihad in America. But for there to be any chance that will be the case, we are going to have to stop importing more jihadists, designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization (the object of pending legislation sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart), and shut down the Brotherhood’s mosques and front groups that are promoting sharia and the realization of its ultimate objective, which is – in the Brotherhood’s own words – “destroying Western civilization from within.”
As former Department of Homeland Security whistleblower and best-selling author of See Something, Say Nothing Philip Haney points out, the jihadists won’t stop trying to kill us, homosexuals and straights alike, until we stop them. And that’s what we must be about now.