July 5, 2016
By Mickey Friedman
“All you need is love,” the Beatles sang. But sadly hate is ever-present.
When I was a boy, bullies maimed but rarely killed. Of course, many whites hated blacks; some in the South enough to lynch. And most people were so terribly uncomfortable with gay people. Violence pervasive. Bullies would drive from Jersey to beat gays in the Village.
Then, the really determined haters learned how to make bombs. I remember Sunday, September 15, 1963, just a month after Martin Luther King’s transcendent “I Have A Dream,” when the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed and four young girls were killed.
Not only was that church the religious center of the black community, it was the base of the civil rights movement. The bombing was the racist response to the growing determination of black people and their white allies to end segregation.
I remind you of this because the bombing was a wake-up call for so many in our nation.
Today we are numb to mass murder.
The Orlando bombing was as much born of hate, or its pathetic cousin, self-hate, as Birmingham. The brutal invasion of a safe space. But rather than face it, we’ve deflected the magnitude of the anti-gay hatred that still infects our nation by talking about ISIS, and Islam.
It’s not that these aren’t a part of the puzzle – like guns and our pathetic surrender to the gun lobby – but isn’t it time we talked about our homegrown hate.
Our great overwhelming fear of the other. Color, creed, sexual preference, nationality, gender. Hate is everywhere.
But rather than reflect on the overwhelming hate that could drive someone to slaughter so many, we turn instead to hate Muslim extremists. Epitomized by Donald Trump’s perverted desire to hear Obama utter the words “Radical Islamic Terror.”
Chant “Radical Islamic Terror” a dozen times and that won’t explain the longstanding discomfort, hatred, persistent and always unacceptable violence directed against people solely because of their sexual preference. In America, by Americans.
So it breaks my heart that in the rush to judgment we’ve lost another opportunity to face our demons. And so we’ll watch the narrative shift as the complicated facts inevitably obliterate the over-simplistic first analyses of our incompetent press and prevaricating politicians.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, our next president, were in rare agreement that the appropriate response to Orlando was the bombing of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Sort of like answering the Saudi-guided terror of 9-11 with the invasion and destruction of Iraq. Which ironically helped create the chaos that’s given us ISIS.
Donald told Fox and Friends: “We have generals that feel we can win this thing so fast and so strong, but we have to be furious for a short period of time, and we’re not doing it!” When Fox host Brian Kilmeade followed up with “Are you saying hit Raqqa right now?” Trump brilliantly replied “We’re going to have to start thinking about something.”
Hillary, who also likes aerial bombing and authorizing drone strikes on her less than smart phone, suggested: “We should keep the pressure on ramping up the air campaign.” Yes, kill Syrians; eliminate anti-gay bias.
But what neither presumptive candidate acknowledged: there was no clear evidence that Orlando was in any way linked to ISIS.
According to the UK Guardian: Central Intelligence Agency chief, John Brennan, “has not been able to uncover any link between Orlando killer Omar Mateen and the Islamic State, despite Mateen’s stated allegiance to the jihadist group during Sunday’s LGBT nightclub massacre.”
According to the Washington Post, “The father of the Orlando nightclub gunman insists that his son was not motivated by Islamist radical ideology, describing the 29-year-old as a “a good son” who did not appear agitated or angry the day before the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.”
“During the rampage, Mateen pledged loyalty to the Islamic State in a call to 911, but his father said he did not believe it was a genuine pledge of support.
“I think he just wanted to boast of himself,” the elder Mateen told The Post late Sunday in an interview from his home in Port St. Lucie, Fla. “No radicalism, no. He doesn’t have a beard even . . . I don’t think religion or Islam had anything to do with this.” Neglecting to mention his son’s despicable abuse of his wife.
Father, son twisted in madness.
But we do know that, according to the FBI, in 2014 there were 5,479 hate crimes reported to law enforcement. Imagine how many went unreported. “Of the 5,462 single-bias incidents reported in 2014, 47 percent were racially motivated. Other motivators included sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, gender identity, disability, and gender.”
18.6% of 5,462 single bias crimes were directed to men and women because of their sexual orientation.
The Trump is fond of saying let’s make America great. How about we say let’s make America not hate.
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“Not Hate” was first published in the June 23, 2016 issue of The Berkshire Record.