The 9/11 hijackers didn’t meet this mold.
But anyway, this guy already threatened people at the club other times he was there, sans any reference to Islamoc terrism.
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Fixed that for you.
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And once again, Boingboing does not disappoint, and people get labeled as “concern trolls” and accused of attempting to avoid some kind of discussion.
Maybe I was trying to avoid discussion firearms in American society, because there’s not much left to discuss for me. I’m European, see, and my desire to respect and accept foreign cultures makes me say that if you want, you can all shoot each other. And if you don’t want to, you can disarm. Simple choice, really.
Or maybe I was trying to avoid discussion on how evil Islam is?
Or was I trying to avoid discussion on how gay people are still put in situations where mental illnesses can develop and fester?
Or was I just observing how this particular tragedy is especially well suited to multiple different spins?
Or maybe I was objecting to have the aspect of “gay person driven mad by oppressive society” silenced because its all about guns?
Best to assume I just want to avoid your favorite way to spin this because of ulterior motives.
For the record, I’m anti-gun, pro-gay and anti-religion.
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The 9/11 guys were not western citizens. I made that distinction on purpose.
Please do not change my statements to reflect your views. Make your own statements.
We need a nice tidy motive because it might let us ignore the event, write it off as something those people do, or terrorism (it’s like rain - what are you gonna do), but certainly not something that we should take action over!
Like i said, thanks for your “concern” over attempts to figure out how to address this problem from within (all of which require politics to resolve) and I hope your culture never finds itself so diseased.
We ALL want to have the space and security to leave firearms out of the discussion. We don’t yet have that luxury.
The problem, in case its still not obvious to you, is that the shooter isn’t exactly a reliable source of his own motivations. For example he also said he was killing people because he found their gay sexuality disgusting, while at the same time being gay himself. Its becoming clear that claiming affiliation with the Islamic State is a way to elevate being batshit crazy to having some sort of noble mission. And I’m not saying that the FBI shouldn’t be exploring some kind of more formal affiliation with ISIS, but you harping on about how “ISIS MUST HAVE TOLD HIM TO DO IT! BECAUSE SIGNS!” really doesn’t help any, especially when there’s currently no evidence whatsoever that he was, other than your vague and panicky deductions.
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I don’t know if they’re “panicky” so much as handwaving around any of the real problems behind these mass murderers. It’s just easier for people to write it off as a “foreign invader” problem than a sickness from within.
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You didn’t get my point at all, did you?
We ALL want the space and security to leave radical Islam and right-wing Islamophobia out of the picture. We ALL want the space and security to leave the repression of gay people out of the picture. We ALL want the space and security to leave the question of whether this repression of gay people has anything to do with religion out of the picture.
We even want the space and security to never have to discuss any such tragedy at all.
Personally I’d also like the space and security to point out “this has multiple angles” in response to another post that says “stop discussing any other angles” without having my motives questioned and being subjected to scare quotes.
Maybe there’s more than one lesson from a tragedy like this. I don’t disapprove of having all of those discussed, although I might not consider all of those discussions worth my time. What I do disapprove of is that apparently we first have to fight in order to decide which issue is the one issue that “this is about”.
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I’d love to get to the point where we can tackle them simultaneously.
In the States, guns are sacrosanct. Mental illness is discussed as a hand wave away and NO MONEY AND HEALTH CARE is offered by those insincere assholes. Religion is discussed as an extension of xenophobia and hate, not in any manner in which we can fix hate-laws on the books or affect religion from entering politics.
We bicker amongst ourselves because we want ANY of these vectors addressed, not because only one is deserving of attention.
And yes, it’s frustrating to hear helpful advice from outside as if we aren’t aware of the plurality of things that need change but won’t.
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It sure seems that way, to you. On the other hand, maybe you are grasping to make that and only that connection?
He claimed allegience to ISIS, Al Qaeda AND Hesbollah.
Those groups hate each other.
Stop it Max, your driving trollies these threads to spread gossip and rumor is grossing me out.
But they also have much in common, especially in regards to their basic feelings about the west.
Where do your feelings come into this? Your feelings about the west, and the place that Islam does have in it. Seems YOU are one who feels very strongly. Are you sure it is someone else’s bias??
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Tut tut, he is clearly clinging to the belief (beyond reality) and chastising us for refusing to accept the questionable concept because he is a being composed of pure logic and purely objective in these matters.
We’re obviously too scared to accept the racetruth.
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google that flag. It’s impressive. Do an image search, a certain dragon encouraged me to stop naming it here, but I think it is highly relevant to this particular discussion in which Max is the most frequent commenter - reminding us it isn’t about the shooters gayness so much as his Islam.
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Seeing that icon always gives me opinions about his more… read-inable posts.
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I guess it might get to his motivations? But we shouldn’t ban any muslims from coming in, of course. I think we’re morally obligated to take in more refugees, given our role in creating the situation which led to the creation of so many people with refugee status. We need to just step up and take in as many as we can, honestly.
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The right is in a tizzy trying to ignore the fact that this was an attack on the gay community… the right is still trying to erase gay people from the fabric of American society by making them go back into the closet…
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It seems to me that the shooter was using social media to blame everyone but himself for his behavior. Ten years ago he probably would’ve added Shi’a as well. If he truly was an inherently violent man who beat his girlfriend and was fired from jobs for punching people, and possibly living a secret life as a gay clubgoer, it’s hard to say what confused anger was welling up inside him, festering for years. But it has nothing to do with organized terrorism except after the fact.
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Has anyone confirmed that he was actually dating men? My understanding was that he was using dating apps to ask about Gay hangouts, and spending time in at least this one bar. But they always described him as drinking alone, and being an angry drunk. I had not heard anything about him actually hooking up, or had anyone come forward saying that he had been seen doing so. But I would not discount the possibility that he might be gay, and repressing his feelings. I have certainly noticed that fundamentalist Christian clergy have a record of the likelihood of them being caught in a gay hookup is pretty proportional to the amount of anti-gay rhetoric that they spew from the pulpit.
Also, his parents are Afghani, which is one of the places in the world that has the most contradictory views on homosexuality, at least from the viewpoint of an outsider. A US Army Special Forces Captain was relieved of command for intervening on behalf of a boy that had been kept chained to the bed of one of the Afghani Officers on base.
And I am not equating normal homosexuality with what is happening over there. What I am saying, is that it must be conflicting to come from a culture where openly dating or actually enslaving young and teenage boys is socially accepted, while simultaneously having what are pretty rabidly anti-gay views.
I assume that we will learn more about the shooter as time passes. If his ties with Islamic Terror are found to be spurious, I will have no problem accepting whatever his real motives turn out to be. Hopefully, most people will base their conclusions on whatever the actual evidence supports, instead of just using the tragedy to reinforce their own preconceived agenda.
Sorry, I did not mean provide well-intended-but-useless advice from the outside. I just wanted to provide my innocent reason for not immediately jumping on the “let’s make this about guns and nothing else” bandwagon, while at the same time proving that I’m not your enemy on this issue.
Austria may be more to my liking as far as gun laws and health care are concerned, but I can empathize with the other issues.
It’s not that Austria is a weapons-free country either. The last time we had a crazy person shoot randomly at people, two people and one bad excuse for a person (the shooter, suicide) died. The perpetrator had ties to the known neo-nazi group “Blood and Honor”. That’s how he had an ilegal weapon. But his motive, to the best of our knowledge, was a fight with his girlfriend.
On the other hand, we’ve had a couple of rapes and molestation cases recently where perpetrators were recent refugees or “refugees” from the Middle East. Of course, those are being used by the islamophobes.
(Clarification of terms: We get true refugees and economically motivated migrants who claim to be “refugees”. Incredibly hard to tell apart).
Let him keep that flag for now. It’s a sign of the stupidity of the far right. Why? That is the Flag of a German resistance movement AGAINST the Nazi regime. Right-wing groups have only recently started appropriating it and interpreting as “German resistance” against non-German things.
You might also do a Google search on his name.
Wikipedia only has German and Polish articles on him. SS Doctor. Participated in selecting disabled people to be murdered. Gave the order to set fire to prisoner blocks in a concentration camp as American soldiers were approaching (“about” 360 bodies were found). He committed suicide on April 27th, 1945.
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