Glenn Greenwald did a
great piece on his substack about the disinformation around the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando five years ago. It shows how much public opinion is driven by propagandists and journalism is a lost art among the regime media.
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Liberal propagandists who pose as journalists treated this storyline as definitively proven. The massacre was "undeniably a homophobic hate crime," Jeet Heer
wrote in The New Republic. "Let's say it plainly: This was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people," Tim Teeman
wrote in The Daily Beast. In
USA Today, James S. Robbins speculated that Mateen was likely "trying to
reconcile his inner feelings with his strongly homophobic Muslim culture." In the days following the killing spree, one writer in
USA Today, Steph Solis,
even accused those of questioning this narrative of propagating bigotry and exhibiting cruel indifference to gay suffering: "Those who insist the shooting was solely an Islamic terror attack try to erase the LGBT community from the narrative, causing only more pain by invalidating their experiences in this ordeal."
But journalism is supposed to function on evidence, not speculation, and there never was any evidence that supported the storyline that he was driven by hatred for LGBTs. The evidence that was available suggested the opposite.On June 12, 2016, Mateen spent just over three hours in PULSE from the time he began slaughtering innocent people at roughly 2:00 a.m. until he was killed by a SWAT team at roughly 5:00 a.m. During that time, he repeatedly spoke to his captives about his motive, did the same with the police with whom he was negotiating, and discussed his cause with local media which he had called from inside the club. Mateen was remarkably consistent in what he said about his motivation. Over and over, he emphasized that his attack at PULSE was in retaliation for U.S. bombing campaigns in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. In his first call with 911 while inside PULSE,
this is what he said about why he was killing people:
Quote:
Because you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. … You need to stop the U.S. airstrikes. They need to stop the U.S. airstrikes, OK? . … This went down, a lot of innocent women and children are getting killed in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, OK? … The airstrikes need to stop and stop collaborating with Russia. OK?
In the hours he spent surrounded by the gay people he was murdering, he never once uttered a homophobic syllable, instead always emphasizing his geo-political motive. Not a single survivor reported him saying anything derogatory about LGBTs or even anything that suggested he knew he was in a gay club. All said he spoke extensively about his vengeance on behalf of ISIS against U.S. bombing of innocent Muslims.
Mateen's postings on Facebook leading up to his attack all reflected the same motive. They were filled with rage about and vows of retaliation against U.S. bombing. Not a single post contained any references to LGBTs let alone anger or violence toward them. "You kill innocent women and children by doing U.S. airstrikes," Mateen
wrote on Facebook in one of his last posts before attacking PULSE, adding: "Now taste the Islamic state vengeance."
