A terrible attack on the gay community.
These kinds of hate crimes and terrorist attacks aren't going to stop anytime soon, but we can minimise the risk of them occurring. Firstly, the United States needs stricter gun control laws: people on the terrorism watchlist aren't barred from having guns, which is madness (although that wouldn't have stopped the terror attack at the black church in Charleston from occurring, nor the San Bernardino attack, because the suspects weren't on the watchlist). Ideally, guns would be completely banned in the United States, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Secondly, we should recognise that all ideologies and beliefs can lead people to do terrible things. Islam has its extremists, just as right-wing, anti-government ideologies have their extremists; indeed, domestic terrorism by right-wing anti-government extremists
is as big a threat,
if not a bigger threat, than jihadi terrorism.
Third, we should identify how best to combat jihadi terrorism. Jihadists have been able to amplify their abhorrent ideologies in ways that, say, Buddhist or Hindu extremists (yes,
they exist) haven't, by taking advantage of sociopolitical strife in the Middle East. Dictators in the Middle East have continued to anger and oppress people for decades, largely supported by the West, and our own interventions in the Middle East have demonstrably, as intelligence experts
have said, contributed to a rise in terrorism in the Middle East.
Robert Pape, a prominent political scientist at the University of Chicago, analysed every known case of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2003, concluding: “there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions... Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland”.
He later expanded on this work by looking at all of the suicide terrorist attacks between 2004 and 2009. He found that “overall, foreign military occupation accounts for 98.5% -- and the deployment of American combat forces for 92% -- of all the 1,833 suicide terrorist attacks around the world in the past six years.” Tellingly, between 1980 and 2003, less than 15% of suicide terrorist attacks were aimed at the United States and its interests; between 2004 and 2009, after the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the United States' continued presence in Afghanistan, 92% of suicide terrorist attacks were aimed at the United States.
And, once extremists in the Middle East have taken advantage of these situations, they can go global, and try to radicalise young, disenfranchised people who seek a stable identity, as they have done with many people who have travelled to Syria. Richard Barrett, former director of global counter-terrorism operations for MI6, writes: “Isis projects a strong identity and sense of purpose and it appeals in particular to people who lack both; it offers them the opportunity to be part of something new, regardless of their gender or abilities."
Fourth, we should not be afraid to criticise conservative interpretations of religions, and Islam in particular is a very conservative religion at the moment. We need to work with liberal and reformist Muslims to discount and discredit not only the views of extremists, but also to promote more socially liberal views too within the Islamic community, just as the main Christian churches have reformed extensively their views on so many issues. The latter in particular will be difficult, given that very socially conservative views continue to exist in Christianity (extensively in the United States) and Judaism.