The Orlando shooting on June 12 has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with US policies, both domestic and foreign.

By domestic, I'm referring to "soft power"* cultural destablization, intended for export around the world to keep the natives distracted and happy. Think Disney on steriods. By foreign, I'm referring to "hard power" US imperialist policies, neoliberalism (in former days, anti-communism).

Omar Mateen was part of the jetsam washed up on US shores as a result of the US-sponsored 'jihad' in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He was born in New York and grew up as a product of the latest warp in American culture. His anger is homegrown, American through and through, shared by millions of Christian (less so Jewish) Americans. It cannot be airbrushed out of the glossy infomercial of American freedom we are fed in the mass media.

Which conspiracy?


9/11 truthers shout COINTPRO. Maybe Omar Mateen was set up to do his deed by some nefarous deep state FBI/CIA monsters. That's possible. But it appears the guy was 'gay',  an angry lumpen (prison guard), driven to carry out his monstrous crime based on the American worship of guns and violence, and fueled by his own simmering disgust with dissolute Amercan culture, which conflicted with his traditional upbringing.

Omar was born in 1986 in New York, to one of the 'lucky' Afghan families who snagged a visa to the land of freedom. This was at the height of the US-sponsored 'jihad' against the Soviet Union, when the US-backed insurgency forced millions of Afghans to flee ther homes and live in refugee camps in Pakistan.

It was cool then to like Osama Bin Laden, and to go to Afghanistan to massacre Afghan socialists supported by the Soviet Union, desperately trying to hold together the fragile Afghan state. Omar's father was welcomed to the US as a committed anti-communist freedom fighter, a devout Muslim, a supporter of the Taliban. Omar--and Orlando--was a direct result of this.

It is Ronald Reagan (actually bungler Jimmy Carter) we have to thank for smashing the Afghan state and sending its smithereens around the world. His Hollywood 'jihad' was, in fact, the largest military build-up in US history, providing the latest in Stinger missiles to what were clearly world-class terrorists.

Western-style homosexuality → western-style homophobia


But the Disney mass culture being exported as part of Bush senior's "New World Order" from the 1990s on has not been as successful as earlier versions, and "gay liberation" is at the heart of the problem.

The civil rights won by gays in the late 60s marched on into uncharted territories. The cultural wires got crossed, causing short circuits like Orlando. It is a symptom of something much deeper. There are many other less spectacular cases of what is now dubbed "homophobia", a term coined only in the 60s, along with "gay liberation".

The movies exported to show the wonders of the West became more and more laden with graphic sex-and-violence, and even sado-masochism, where master and slave act out the old imperial agenda in a slick fetishtic way, that include male-male sex, and portray a new metrosexual lifestyle. The Orlando Pulse disco would have featured lots of chains and other bizarre get-ups, where mostly men were acting out their fantasies.

This 'culture' is seen in the third world as part of the western imperial agenda to weaken moral fiber and keep them (literally) in chains. Westerners are blind to nonwestern precapitalist sexual mores in the (now ex-)colonial world, where there was some acceptance of homosexuality, but which didn't fit western style gaylib, now exported to them with State Department funding as part of the soft power conquest of the third world.

Whatever their intent, international gay activists have ended up replicating and even strengthening in other cultures the very situation of repression they set out to challenge in their own countries. Joseph Massad writes, “The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating."

The advocates of this paradigm advocate what looks like a scientific, essentialist program that the entire world should adopt. What it is, however, is a kind of western secular nativism seeking to replace what it sees as backward nativisms everywhere, forcing one and all to choose their slot. Practitioners of msm (men having sexual relations with men) who reject the gay slot created for them by western activists are catalogued as “self-hating” and guilty of “homosexual homophobia”.

The same process replicated itself in the US among blacks, who did not pay much attention to whatever msm there was among blacks until the black civil rights movement took off in the 1950s and homosexuality was seen as a white affectation that was part of their own slavery and should be stamped out.

Put the hard power imperial wars and the soft power invasion together, you get a world culture that is out of imperial control. You get Orlando.

Trans'gender' tipping point


As the gaylib agenda chugged on, it spawned a slew of increasingly confusing neologisms, culminating in such crazed terms as LGBTQQIP and LGBTQIA**, advocating legal rights not just for gay sex but for variations such as "questioning" and the now celebrated "transgender". Not just for people, but for their feelings.

Transgender is a misleading term. It's mostly about men who think their women but don't want to have the sex change operation. That would make them eunuchs, a venerable 'gay' tradition, though 'gay' is an anachronism, a term coined in the 20th century and now liberally applied to Socrates and Alexander the Great by gay activists. It is what may be called "pinkwash". The latest campaign is all about trans women, gay guys who want their cake and eat it, to make society accept them as bona fide women without the pain of castration, to the extent that they are free to use the women's can.

If you can articulate this argument, almost everyone agrees it is going too far. But most people for good reason find discussing such matters distasteful. So they hold their nose and say, 'What's the problem? Let everyone use whatever washroom/ changeroom they want to.'

We cower before the god of political correctness, though it's really just a kind of prudishness ('Don't talk about such things!'). The trans men (i.e., mostly lesbians) are not doing the screaming, but they are conned into accepting the strident trans women's (biological males) campaign, 'in solidarity'.

Feminists nail the culprit

Only a few brave feminist, including Camille Paglia and Germaine Greer, have dared speak out, and they are pilloried. Germaine Greer was denied an honorary doctorate at her alma mater Newnham College, Cambridge, after trans women protested because she argues that trans women are "not women".

Last October, long before Orlando, Paglia said, “Nothing better defines the decadence of the West to the jihadists than our toleration of open homosexuality and this transgender mania now." Of course, Mateen's act is contrary to any religion, including Islam, but Paglia saw and said what should be obvious to all, especially Obama.

In his last moments, Mateen paid a kind of poisoned tribute to Ronald Reagan, who was a militant anti-communist and a supporter of McCarthy's witch hunts of both communists and gays in the 1950s. Gays got off relatively lightly then, in that none were electrocuted for their way of life. Only communists (the Rosenbergs) got the electric chair.

At 2:22am, he made a 911 call in which he pledged allegiance to ISIL and saluted Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers, further offspring of Reagan's anti-communism. At 5:00am police finally killed him, but only after he had killed 49 people and injured 53 more, the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in US, the deadliest incident of violence against gays in US history. The deadliest terrorist attack in the US since--guess what?--9/11.

More gaylib or less?

The gaylibbers are jumping up and down, saying, 'Yes, a self-hating gay. If only he'd 'come out', embraced gaydom. Then we'll all be happy.' According to Vanity Fair, Mateen had even been befriended by a drag queen. Quite possibly he was okay with gay men who cross-dressed. Traditionally, cross-dressing is acceptable in many cultures.

If you like men and feel like a women, then you're really just a man who likes to cross-dress and sleep with men. The native Americans long had this tradition (berdash). Afghan boys played the role of women both in the arts and with mujahideen soldiers. In the West, there have always be the Quentin Crisps.

If you like women and like to cross-dress, that's okay too, but people will find it amusing. Best stay 'in the closet' with your wife or be a drag queen in public. Again, a venerable tradition.

So maybe the gaylibbers have it backwards. Maybe--to avoid further Orlandos--the gaylibbers should stop 'questioning' the social limits of whatever it is they intend for society, and learn from the wisdom of traditon. Discretion is the better part of valor. Oh, and refuse to join the military--now welcoming gays with open arms--to go and kill imperial flotsam like Omar.
xxxx

* Eric Walberg, Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games, Clarity Press, 2011, p27.
** LGBTQQIP means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Pansexual; LGBTQIA means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex and Allies. There are many other acronyms vying for popularity

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Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s.

He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeerah and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio.

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Eric's latest book The Canada Israel Nexus is available here http://www.claritypress.com/WalbergIV.html