Friday, October 6, 2017

The Las Vegas Massacre: the Arab World Reacts

It’s been almost five days since a piece of dirt named Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of innocent Las Vegas concertgoers, murdering, at last count, fifty-nine people, and injuring nearly five hundred. Five days in which we've confronted our shock, celebrated the heroes, and begun the process of grieving, a process which, for the friends and loved ones of the victims, will never end completely.

Now that we've had a decent interval for those things, it's time to comment on more mundane aspects of the tragedy. Like politics, or since this is a blog about Islam, the reaction in the Arab world.

That there exists hatred in the Arab world for Americans is well known, so it's no surprise that some of that hatred spilled over onto Twitter. As you'll see, this attitude was by no means universal, but that's where I'll start. To my disgust, and the disgust of decent people everywhere, many Arabs cheered for the killer. They implied that Americans deserved to die because of Iraq…

I wish he slaughtered more because then they would know and feel sorry for the people of Iraq and the Levant.

Or Trump…

#Las_Vegas Trump you terrorist.

Or Hitler…

#Las_Vegas_Attack
They destroyed Hiroshima
And Hitler killed a quarter of the people of the Earth
And they destroyed Iraq and Syria
And on top of this they accuse the Muslims of terrorism. Wow!!

Others were more subtle in their gloating. They merely posted verses from the Quran. Some seemed innocuous, but the common theme was judgment. So the message was that Stephen Paddock was an instrument of Allah, to rain down justice upon America.

And if they keep to the (right) way, We should certainly give them to drink water in abundance [al-Jinn:16] [Maulana Muhammad Ali translation] #Las_Vegas

But Pharaoh disobeyed the messenger, so We seized him with a violent grip. [al-Muzzammil:16] [Maulana Muhammad Ali translation] #Las_Vegas

I’m not sure what the deal is with the emojis. The heart kind of makes sense, but the hamburger seems completely bizarre.

Taking their lead from Thomas Friedman and Piers Morgan, many Arabs complained about what they perceived as a double standard: no one was calling Paddock a terrorist. If he had been a Muslim, they felt, things would have been different:

American writer Thomas Friedman: What if the shooter in #Las_Vegas was Muslim?”

British Journalist (Morgan): If the one who let lose the bullets was Muslim it would have been considered a terrorist attack, but it involved a white American, so it was considered a shooting incident #Las_Vegas

In my humble opinion, the claim that Paddock wasn’t called a terrorist because he was white is the pinnacle of idiocy. After all, no one hesitated to call the white Oklahoma City bombers terrorists. Dictionary.com defines terrorism as “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.” By that definition, Paddock may have been an evil man, but not a terrorist. As far as we know, he wasn’t trying to coerce anybody into doing anything. He didn’t have any political purposes. Whether he was called a terrorist had nothing to do with being a white American. That this was the pretext for Morgan and Friedman to play the race card is symptomatic of the intellectual rot and the tedious obsession with race, to the exclusion of all else, which infests the Left in 2017. All white people, according to them, are racists (yawn) and damn any sense of intellectual rigor or notion that words have meanings. Ironic, given the leftist assertion that they're the intellectual ones, in contrast to the "anti-intellectual" Right.

But I digress.

In any case, it’s not true that no one called Paddock a terrorist; the terrorists did. In a claim disputed by the FBI, ISIS took credit for the attack. They released a statement that Paddock was one of their own, having been converted to Islam some months ago.

Drawing on social media posts collected by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Pamela Geller provided numerous examples in her blog of Muslims cheering this development. They called Paddock “Brother” and “the Lion of Monotheism.”

But the tweets I came across were more skeptical. Paddock just didn’t seem the Islamist type:

Desperate ISIS’s impulse to adopt a drunk, “Stephen Paddock” and his terrible crime in #Las_Vegas is to lift morale with the news.

ISIS adopts an attack committed by an unbeliever. In other words, Scott says to you, where is the credibility of terrorism? If you eat cheese, right!

In the end, it was heartwarming how many tweets I came across from ordinary, decent people, who just wanted to express sympathy and solidarity with the United States in its hour of tragedy. They were an example to all of us:

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092. It depicts the war for the Muslim soul between those who seek to enforce shari’a strictly, persecute Jews and Christians, and stamp out "un-Islamic" science, and those who wink at a few sins, tolerate their non-Muslim neighbors, and write science books instead of burning them.

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