The Orlando Shooting: Hate Is Hate

By Joseph Earp

Last night, Omar Mateen stepped into the Pulse nightclub in Florida and opened fire on those inside. By the time he was killed by police, Mateen had slain fifty, making the shooting the deadliest in modern US history.

Fifty people. It’s a staggering number, one that is hard to digest on a practical level. I’m sitting here at the desk in my lounge room, trying to name fifty friends. Imagining each and every one of them, gone. Taken.

These days, we mourn these mass tragedies in complicated ways. We air our outrage, we vocalise our anger, and we search, as ever, for people to blame. We try to swallow the things we now know. The horror that our daily lives are designed to obscure: that there are people out there willing to end the lives of fifty strangers, fifty souls they have never met.

We seek to explain their actions. Opportunists like Donald Trump argue that such atrocities can only be driven by Islam. They use their bilious buzz words, and they fire up the frightened, driving them to polling booths, convincing them the only way to stop the horror is to to keep out the shrieking monsters they are sure are coming from overseas.

In the next few days, Trump and his right wing cronies will use Orlando to further their political careers, perhaps not realising that the real target of the attack was the LGTBQI community they so endlessly demonize and attack. They will argue that Mateen was guided by religious forces designed to take down the US. They will politicize Mateen’s actions. They will put reasons into his mouth – write his manifestos for him. And they will claim that this is a terrorist act.

Because, in the eyes of the modern media, the Orlando shooting became a terrorist attack the moment it was revealed the shooter was ethnic. If he had been white, the word ‘terrorist’ would not be used. He would be a lunatic rather than a radical.

In this way we pigeonhole hate. We diversify it. We quantify it. We come up with ways of explaining it, and using it to blame those we already despise. We put hate into categories, sometimes as a way of wishing it out of being – sometimes to further propagate it.

We turn hate into something it is not. We intellectualise it. But there is nothing intellectual about hate. There is nothing political about it. The forces that guide a man to walk into a nightclub and shoot fifty strangers have nothing to do with Islam and have everything to do with that man’s mental health.

We are willing to accept that Love Is Love, so why can’t we accept that Hate Is Hate? Whatever cover or cause a psychopath with a gun uses to justify their actions, that does not change the fact that it was hate that led them to pull that trigger.

They might blame Islam. They might blame Nazism, in the style of Anders Behring Breivik. Or they might blame Twinkies, as the senator who shot Harvey Milk did. But whatever cause a psychopath uses does not alter the issue. Don’t let psychopaths tell you what led them to hurt, and to harm. You wouldn’t listen to anything else they have to say, so why would you listen to that?

Omar Mateen’s own father told the news that the shooting had “nothing to do with religion”. Remember those words in the coming days, when Islam is attacked – when our freedoms are further restricted by our government. When hate speech is used to collect votes and motivate those who would otherwise ignore the political system to vote in droves.

Remember those words. Hate never has anything to do with religion. Hate is hate. Blood spilt is blood spilt. Those lost are lost.

And the love that fills the void left is love, pure and simple.