The latest information about the Orlando terrorist seems to confirm that the gunman’s anti-Western ideology was imported, rather than “homegrown.”
During his national security speech, Donald Trump explained that Mateen’s parents immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan:
The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here. That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about.
Although it is, by definition, true that there would have never been a terrorist attack if Mateen’s parents had not been allowed in America in the first place, in recent days the media has seemed indignant that Trump would suggest as much– noting that Mateen was a New York native.
However, as CBS reports, Mateen’s father—an Afghan migrant— had “well-known anti-American views and is an ideological supporter of the Afghan Taliban. A new message posted by the father on Facebook early Monday morning also makes it clear he could have passed anti-homosexual views onto his son.”
CBS further reports that the father hosts a program that “takes a decidedly Pashtun nationalistic, pro-Taliban slant; full of anti-U.S. rhetoric and inflammatory language… In his Facebook videos, the alleged gunman’s father has often appeared wearing a military uniform and declaring himself the leader of a ‘transitional revolutionary government’ of Afghanistan.”
Trump suggested federal immigration policy ought to defend the “values of America” by preventing the importation of values, which are “incompatible with Western values and institutions”– such as those from regions, which hold oppressive views towards women, gays, lesbians, Jews and Christians.
According to Pew, nearly all Muslims in Afghanistan (99 percent) support sharia law as official law.
Andrew McCarthy has explained that “the mandate that homosexuals be killed” comes from Sharia. McCarthy notes that Ayatollah Ali Sistani— an influential sharia authority who has been praised as a so-called “moderate”— has said, “sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible” [emphasis added].
“The inspiration for Muslims to brutalize and mass murder gay people does not come from ISIS. It is deeply rooted in Islamic law, affirmed by many of Islam’s most renowned scholars,” McCarthy writes.
This is why, wherever sharia is the law, homosexuals are persecuted and killed. See, for instance, this 2014 Washington Post report listing ten Muslim countries where homosexuality may be punished by death (Yemen, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Iraq — notwithstanding its new, U.S.-supported constitution)… Today, we have gotten another glimpse of radicalization, which is not “homegrown” but rather fueled by a foreign, anti-American, anti-liberty ideology.
Yet even though Mateen’s father preached anti-American, anti-Western views, the United States issued him a visa and gave his child automatic citizenship for being born on U.S. soil.
The Daily Mail writes that Omar Mateen “journeyed to Saudi Arabia twice in recent years on pilgrimages to the holy city of Mecca. Omar Mateen made the trips to the Middle East in March of 2011 and March of 2012, spending 10 days in the country a spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s Interior told NBC News. It was one year after that second trip where he performed Umrah – which is considered the lesser pilgrimage compared the Hajj – that Mateen first landed on the radar of the FBI.”
As the Washington Times reported:
While immigrants draw much of the attention, it’s their children who are proving to be the most fruitful recruiting ground for radical jihad in the U.S., accounting for at least half of the deadly attacks over the past decade… [Omar Mateen] follows in the footsteps of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino, California, terrorists who was the son of Pakistanis; Nadir Soofi, one of two men who attacked a drawing competition in Garland, Texas, last year and whose father was from Pakistan; and then-Maj. Nidal Hassan, the child of Palestinian immigrants whose shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 set off the modern round of deadly lone-wolf attacks.
The Washington Times adds that, according to the University of Maryland’s Alejandro Beutel, some first-generation Americans (second-generation immigrants):
particularly those from Muslim-majority societies — can have deeper struggles, caught between seeing themselves as fully American or as part of their parents’ home cultures… The same identity struggles affect other first-generation Americans, but Asian and Hispanic immigrants, for example, don’t have al Qaeda or Islamic State recruiters interested in them, Mr. Beutel said. Instead, they are typically targeted for recruitment by criminal gangs.
Every year the U.S. permanently resettles approximately 100,000 Muslim migrants on green cards each year. Between 2001 and 2013, the United States permanently resettled 1.5 million Muslim immigrants throughout the United States. Under Hillary Clinton’s immigration plan, the U.S. will resettle 730,000 permanent migrants from the Muslim world during her first term alone. These figures do not include the total number of temporary migrants such as foreign workers and foreign students. If you include temporary migrants, the total number of Muslim migrants coming across the border for one reason or another during Clinton’s first term would be somewhere closer to 1.4 million.