Grief-stricken and speechless, responders to murder in Tel Aviv and Orlando should consider both the complexities and the ultimate simplicity of terrorism.
I.
As we went to press late last Wednesday (June 8), news arrived of a terror attack in the Tel Aviv marketplace. Two 21-year-old Palestinian Arabs mowed down unarmed Israeli diners in cold blood.
As we observed the ultimate holiday of peace, Shavuot, which marks the revelation of the Torah — of “thou shalt not murder” — a terror attack struck an Orlando club. An ISIS-inspired American Muslim mowed down unarmed revelers in cold blood.
Messages of solidarity, “I am Tel Aviv,” “I am Orlando,” went up on social media. The message of the attacks — terrorism, which is synonymous with hate — and the messages of solidarity — terrorism is absolutely evil — were perfectly clear.
There was, of course, a particular context to the Tel Aviv terrorist attack: the Jewish political presence in the Middle East.
There was, of course, a particular context to the Orlando terrorist attack; in fact, there were multiple layers of context: the American pattern of mass shootings; the sexual orientation of the revelers; the type of murder weapon; possible mental illness; the puzzling police work; Islamic ideology; and possibly more.
But the commonalities trump the individual contexts.
Mass murder is mass murder.
Terrorism is terrorism.
Hate is hate.
Grief is grief.
The murder of innocents is a violation of the fundamental moral code of civilization, “thou shalt not murder.”
Senselessness is senselessness.
Broken families are broken families.
Pain is pain.
Lost life — lost potential — lost hope — is universal, no matter the lifestyle, the ethnicity, the religion, the race or the politics of the victims.
To be sure, the terrorist incident in Orlando requires our attention to its contextual issues concerning guns, mental illness, police work (taken broadly to include policy and tactics), lifestyle and radical Islam.
As obvious as the need to address these issues is, we do so with trepidation. Too often and too quickly the discussion of these issues blunt the human instinct to mourn. I am Tel Aviv. I am Orlando.
Too often and too quickly the discussion of these issues easily yields to unidimensional causes or solutions that erase the interconnectedness, the multilayered nature, of this type of incident.
II.
Guns. The Orlando murderer acquired his weapon legally. He had no prior record. True, he had raised red flags, but was cleared by the FBI. Tightened gun laws, in his case, may have prevented nothing. This does not mean that tightened gun laws are an unproductive idea. They could lower the murder rate; they could mitigate mass shootings. Take the Orlando incident, for example.
Omar Mateen’s murder weapon was an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle designed for combat, not for civilians. It is designed to kill or injure as many people in as little time as possible, not as a weapon of sport or self-defense. The AR-15 is enabled to automatically reload the chamber and “reset” the action, which greatly increases the weapon’s ability to be fired rapidly — to commit mass murder. These weapons have the power to kill even if the victim is hit not in the head or torso. The use of military assault rifles by mass shooters in Orlando, San Bernardino, Paris, Aurora, etc., serve no purpose other than murder. Such a weapon has no place in a civilian’s hands.
We see no derogation of anyone’s legitimate rights to a gun if its purchase, once approved, is delayed for a potential cooling off period, to decrease crimes of passion.
The Orlando murderer’s weapon was not a unidimensional cause of his horrible act. One cannot demonstrate that if the Orlando murderer had had a less powerful weapon, he would have murdered fewer people. This is no reason not to ban such a weapon from civilian use.
The Orlando murderer may have suffered from mental illness. The public funding of the treatment for the mentally ill is scandously and inhumanely low. The murderer’s lack of such treatment was not a unidimensional cause of his horrible act. He could have been treated — just like the Aurora shooter was treated — and still have committed his act of terror. This is no reason not to increase the funding for the treatment of the mentally ill.
The Orlando murderer may have benefitted from lax police work — he was flagged but not isolated by the FBI. He was left umolested for hours in the club without direct police intervention as negotiations were attempted. The police work here was not a unidemnsional cause, or facilitator, of his horrible act. One cannot demonstrate that if the FBIand the Orlando police had acted differently the murderer would have been stopped or his actions mitigated. The intent to murder can be shielded by a murderer and the act of mass murder can be decided upon quickly. These are no reason for the FBI and the police not to reexamine their policies and procedures from top to bottom.
The Orlando murderer may have harbored a particularly intensified hatred of, or virulent ambivalence about, homosexuality or its associated lifestyles. His self-confessed allegiance to ISIS and other Islamic terrorists may have fostered this, or his inspiration taken from Islamic terrorism may have stood alone as the ground of his hatred. Counseling about this hatred, be the counseling religious or psychological, may not have deterred him. Based on all we know about him thus far, his hatred was both religion-based and lifestyle-based, and neither was a unidimensional cause of his horrible act.
This is no reason not to name Islamic terrorism for what it is, the better to muster the will and to devise the right tactics to defeat it. Terrorism in San Bernardino and Orlando is not “homegrown”; it is inspired by ISIS and by other radical Islamic groups in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East —the more dangerous for not being organizationally linked to one of them.
This is no reason not to protect the right to life of every single human being, whatever lens one might put on his or her lifestyle. There are some 11 countries, mostly Arab, in which homosexuality is punishable by death; the United States, thank G-d, is not one of them. Here, murder is murder. Terrorism is terrorism. People here, as well as around the world, say it best, and point the only way forward, when they say:
I am Tel Aviv.
I am Orlando.
