A friend of mine once joked: “The day aliens come to invade, will be the day we have peace on Earth.” I laughed and asked him why. “Well,” he replied, “we would all work together to survive.” As cynical as he sounded, I think he is right. It is usually in the face of adversity that differences are put aside in order to achieve a common goal.
When I heard the news about Orlando, my reaction was very straight forward. I always knew it would happen eventually, and was sad that it did. When living in London, I was always aware of the chance that the Tube would get hit by Daesh. I had Jewish friends who knew that there was a good chance their neighbourhood would get targeted too.
When, during one of the attacks in Paris, it was reported that a Jewish store was targeted, it was no surprise to anyone. We hear of Daesh planning attacks on Christians too, and wanting to target the Vatican. It would seem that it is only a matter of time until a group of churchgoers are hit.
Mind you, plenty of Christians have already been persecuted by Daesh, as have others who practice a different religion, and in many cases Muslims too. They have been stoning women, and throwing gay people off towers, with a crowd below waiting to stone them just in case they survive the fall. There are videos of this to prove it.
It is always sad to see someone being targeted because they are different, be it religion, gender, sexuality or nationality.
However, I found myself rather alone in this reaction. There were those on Facebook who seemed to view the incident as a homophobic act detached from the context of Daesh and the current threat all of us are under. Saying this was an attack on the ‘West’, like Paris’s Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo, was denying that homophobia existed here in the West.
From this came many arguments about how the media are using the religion of the assailant to gloss over the fact that it was a homophobic attack, and to consider it as an attack by a self-radicalised Jihadi targeting something seen as ‘Western’ and wrong. Here is why I disagree.
As much as I dislike using the term ‘the West’, it is commonly used to talk about a set of countries.
The ‘West’ means something altogether very different to those outside it, especially those who hate it
However, it means something altogether very different to those outside it, especially those who hate it. While we battle to eradicate racism here in Malta and Europe, we are unaware that there are people who read us using the same generalisations and misconceptions that you find in racist views.
The West for them is a term that erases all differences that actually exist, and like all racist terminology and fallacies, lumps us all into the same box. They talk about how we treat our women, and show pictures of the front pages of magazines without mentioning that actually many people in the West disapprove of the objectification of women by the media.
They talk about our horrible liberal values allowing two men to get married, and then show pictures taken from websites no self-respecting gay man would ever visit.
They show videos of some crazy ‘pastor’ in the middle of the US’s deep South, and proclaim how dangerous all Western Christians are. Yes, all this is Western and the object of their hate, anger and lunacy.
So when a lunatic, who has been under FBI surveillance and interviewed in connection with other suicide bombers in the past, pledges allegiance to Daesh, goes into a gay club and murders people, he is not acting on what he has been taught while living in the US, but what he has filled his mind online with the help Daesh propaganda.
Yes, the man was gay. He had reportedly been violent towards his first wife, and was leading a double life.
He went to that very same club before, and reportedly used apps like Grindr to meet guys. Yes, it is likely that he was suffering like many LGBT people suffer when they are subjected to conservative lifestyles, and are not allowed to be themselves.
But not all LGBT people suffering in the closet go out on a rampage andshoot people.
The fact that he was gay and went to gay bars does not discredit the fact that this was another terrorist attack from Daesh. It is, in fact, in keeping with what you would expect.
Some of the Paris attackers had reportedly never even set eyes on the Qur’an. Some suicide attackers go out and get drunk the night before.
If you are in search of consistency, you are not about to find it among the ranks of Daesh’s militants and lone wolves.
We are all targets to these lunatics, for one reason or another. Perhaps those pastors in the US who expressed their approval of the shooting might do well to remember that one day Daesh will target people like them, for exactly the same reason and with exactly the same zeal. Perhaps all conservatives might want to think about this for a second.
Edward Caruana Galizia is an actor and studied psycho-social studies at Birkbeck University of London.