We are all still in deep shock after the brutal massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida where 49 people were slaughtered by Omar Mateen, a Muslim American citizen. Since the massacre, wrongly described by some media as the ‘deadliest’ attack on civilians in recent American history, we are trying to fathom Mateen’s motives in carrying out this atrocious anti-gay crime.
In the current climate, where Muslims and Islam are tagged with ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalism’, it is deeply worrying that two of the US presidential contenders compete in describing Mateen’s atrocity as ‘Islamic’. It is particularly unsettling that the Democratic contender Hillary Clinton has seen fit to say just a day after that the event that she was not afraid to say ‘radical’ Islam as she countered attacks from the Republican contender Donald Trump that she’s too politically correct to use the phrase. ‘From my perspective, it matters what we do more than what we say,’ Clinton said on CNN. ‘And it mattered we got bin Laden, not what name we called him. Whether you call it radical jihadism or radical Islamism, I’m happy to say either. I think they mean the same thing.’ Compare this outburst with President Obama’s reasoned argument that using the meaningless term ‘radical Islam’ tars millions of believers with a racist religious brush: ‘There is no magic to the phrase “radical Islam”. It is a political talking point. It is not a strategy’.
Apparently Mateen was not only a violent husband whose wife escaped his marital brutality by the skin of her teeth, but also a frequent user of the same gay nightclub he attacked and of gay dating websites, so clearly someone with a conflictual sexual orientation. Having also worked for the security firm G4S he was clearly a complex character, whose motives were anything but simply attributable to ‘radical Islam’, despite the rush by many racists, including representatives of the state of Israel, to use the massacre to further incite against Muslims and Islam.
I was thrilled to stand on O’Connell Street on Saturday 6 February as part of a large coalition of people, Irish and migrants, who congregated in front of the GPO to say no to racism and Islamophobia and to counter Pegida Ireland’s plans to hold its inaugural meeting. Pegida stands for ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident’ (in German Patriotische Europaer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes). It was established in October 2014 in Germany, where thousands of neo Nazi fascists have since marched in opposition to Muslim migrants, though the ‘Islamisation’ of the West is of course a figment of the racists’ imagination as Muslims remain a small persecuted minority throughout the West.
At the end of Easter 2016 week I feel somewhat 1916-ed out. I spent the week watching Insurrection, the wonderful day by day series about the 1916 Rising produced and directed by my late husband Louis for RTE in 1966 and which was re-broadcast for the first time only this year, fifty years after it was made. I also attended exhibitions and other events, and strolled the festive streets of Dublin. Despite the attempts by our right wing (non) government to write out the revolutionary Rising leaders in favour of reformers such as O’Connell, Parnell, Redmond and Grattan, Dublin did itself proud, with streets festooned with flags and shop windows, from banks to souvenir shops, displaying copies of the 1916 Proclamation and pictures of the 1916 leaders.
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