Omar Mateen: A U.S. Patriot Gone Astray

Posted by Oui | Jun 13, 2016 | 17 |

Had US Marine stickers on his car “Semper Fi” and wanted to join the police force …. see selfies with NYPD shirts. He too was paternalistic, authoritarian beating his wife, brought in from a dating site as a bride from Uzbekistan.

Bought just last week, Omar Mateen obtained his weapons legally as he had been screened by FBI in 2013 en 2014 and Omar worked as a security guard for G4S. Recall the organization from the London Olympics – G4S failures prompt further military deployment .

Source: WPTV.com

Neighbor who knew Omar Mateen
tells @WPTV he had U.S. Marine
stickers on his car, including one
that read Semper Fi.

[h/t MoA]

Born in USA as Omar Mir Seddique from Afghan immigrants in 1987

Mass shooter Omar Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen recently visited Congress, the State Department and met political leaders during a trip to Washington, DC. Mateen, who made the trip in April, is seen in social media posts posing in front of the State Department and Democratic Foreign Services Committee offices.

The Afghanistan native, who also regularly writes open letters to President Barack Obama, has expressed gratitude Afghan Taliban who hosts the Durand Jirga Show on a channel called Payam-e-Afghan, which broadcasts from California.

“Payam-E-Afghan TV is an Afghani-centric satellite television network based in Los Angeles, California, launched in 2007. It features news, music, and entertainment shows in primarily the Persian and Pashto language. It is a channel owned and supported financially by Omar Khatab.”

« click for more info Seddique Mateen opposed ISI and Pakistan's interference with Afghan people (Photo - Daily Mail)

Photo captions from his DC trip describe meetings with the Foreign Relations Committee and a trip to a hearing for Afghanistan security, according to the Independent Journal.

Pictures from 2015 show Mateen meeting Reps Charlie Rangel, Dana Rohrabacher and Ed Royce. Royce is the Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Dozens of videos are posted under Mateen’s name on YouTube, where he speaks on a range of political subjects in the Dari language. One video shows him declaring his candidacy for the Afghan presidency.

Posts include topics such as ‘Rise Afghan people against Pakistan’ and ‘Intelligent service and Military of Pakistan real Enemy of the USA (sic)’. In one video the elder Mateen holds up a sign that reads: ‘ISI Pakistan and Military is Destroying 14 years of US work in Afghanistan to cut AID to killers’.

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Oui

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17 Comments

Arthur Gilroy on June 13, 2016 at 7:09 am

I have another read on the Florida killer. I wrote it in answer to something that RUKidding wrote on Booman’s recent post Taking a Break and I am reposting it here.

You write:

Apparently the ex-wife of the shooter said he was very unstable, and the father said the son had “issues” with gays. So yeah, it’s all about ISIS… probably not.

But it is “about” ISIS, even if it’s not in a direct line. ISIS…and radical Islam…exist. This is an undeniable fact. And people who are involved in those movements are both horrifyingly violent and using that violence to get what they want. This is undeniable as well. This fool? This Florida shooter? “ISIS/radical Islam” serve as his excuse. He’s just a batshit crazy motherfucker with Middle Eastern relatives. There are always these kinds of people in societies, all across the world. Successful societies either find a controlled use for them…in the military, as police…or imprison/execute them. We are no longer a successful society. We have no culture that reroutes these people. In fact, we now have a culture that drives them even crazier from the get-go…a culture that glorifies violence from the crib. I really don’t know if that culture can be changed. It may be too late. Too many generations of violent media; too many horrifically unstable people.

“Unstable”…that’s the word that people who knew him seem to be using, and it’s a good word to use for people like this. They are unstable in an unstable society, so they are more liable to eventually act out.

Solution?

Change the culture. It’s not about firearms, it’s about the glorification of violence up and down the system. How to change that culture? It has to come from the top, and that is not about to happen because there is no longer any moral weight…like religion…pulling in the opposite direction. There’s just money. The monetization of morality. “Relative” morality. If we do it, it’s good; if our enemies do it, it’s bad.

It’s also good if it makes money. We have role models like Kanye West openly bragging about how much money they made as dealers of truly poisonous drugs. We have amazingly profitable movies, TV shows and video games that are about nothing but excused violence. We fight wars for profit that kill millions and glorify that violence. And then we’re shocked at the endless, mindless violence that we are seeing in the society?

Get real.

We’ve earned it.

I don’t know how far this will go, how long it will continue before we experience a total breakdown of the system as it now operates. I really don’t. If you were to personify the entire U.S. culture as one person, that “person” would be easily seen as someone veering ever further into a violent form of insanity.

Maybe it’s guilt-driven. We certainly have enough guilt to go around.

Later…

AG
- karl pearson on June 15, 2016 at 1:32 am
  
  AG, that’s one of your best comments. I do not see things changing, although I hope I’m wrong. As I wrote in a comment below, the discussion of solutions to curb these mass shootings is framed mostly in political terms: he said–she said. Because politics has infiltrated every air molecule, the solution is predetermined to be political; but the parties have locked horns, so there will be no solution–only more lip service. Conclusion: no solution–more violence. Media rushes to report more violence. There are many culprits in this story.
- JoelDanWalls on June 20, 2016 at 1:41 pm
  
  AG–I think the words you’re looking for are these: Sociopath. Sociopathy.
  
  The role of sociopathy in social dysfunction is IMHO way under-rated. Give guns to a sociopath like Mateen and you get a massacre. Give power to a sociopath like Trump and you might get World War Three.
Oui on June 13, 2016 at 10:10 am
Will Orlando Massacre Help Hillary Clinton Unite Nation — or Give Opening to Donald Trump? | The Forward – Opinion |

The campaign started almost immediately, even before the initial details became clear. Was the Orlando attack an act of terror, like last December’s onslaught in San Bernardino in which a radicalized Muslim couple killed 14 civilians, or a hate crime, like the attack in Charleston by a white racist who specifically targeted African Americans because of the color of their skin? President Obama, in a lackluster appearance on Sunday, weighed in that it was both.

Trump, on the other hand, accentuated the Islamic terror aspect, as did many other Republicans. Their associations were with Al-Qaida and New York’s Twin Towers while Democrats tended to list the victims of Orlando horror together with the schoolchildren of Newtown, Connecticut and the moviegoers of Aurora, Colorado. Republicans focused their attention on the enemy without and the weakness within. Democrats preferred to raise gun control, gay rights and other issues that their narrative prefers.

As most Israelis know, terror attacks by Islamic radicals often benefit the right, especially when placed in the hands of a master manipulator such as Benjamin Netanyahu. The right knows how to foster fear, nurture hostility and pledge a forceful response while the left usually mumbles and stumbles with rational explanations, underlying causes and ifs, buts and maybes. Trump has already gained from Sunday morning’s butchery: it changed the agenda from mounting concern over his personal shortcomings that seemed to threaten his candidacy. Most Republicans seemed surefooted again after weeks of avoiding questions of whether or not they endorse Trump and why. They were back to slamming Obama and Clinton’s impotence, just like before.
- karl pearson on June 15, 2016 at 12:38 am
  
  In the media, everything is seen through the Dem and Repub lenses. As a result, both “sides” are presented and solutions to deter another horrifying event are offered only in political terms. This way, nothing gets done regarding these extreme cases of violence because the 2 parties are gridlocked. I can remember when there were past mass murders (they were rare), and experts in the field of psychology, sociology, and psychiatry would be interviewed. Solutions would be discussed and politics was on the back burner. How long has it been since we have seen solutions to our problems framed in non-political terms? The media smothers us with politics, violence, sex, materialism, and celebrity status and our downward spiral marches on. Our household is in the process of pulling the plug on our satellite service and buying rabbit ears. Why contribute to own’s own demise? That’s nuts and think of the savings! Most importantly, think of the freedom and the pleasure of removing such a toxic product from the home. More of our friends and family are doing the same.
Oui on June 13, 2016 at 12:23 pm

From a comment @MoA

Posted by: virgile | Jun 13, 2016 11:56:16 AM | 103

If US Moslems are really ‘sorry’ then I’d like to see them asking the Moslems preachers in Florida and in the USA to publicly apologize to the gay community for this act and assuring them to Islam does not condemn them to a death sentence.

Until I see that I will continue to believe that the Moslems in the USA are not really integrated in the US culture and that they do not respect the Constitution in reality.

My reply …

@virgile

Love to hear you define “US culture” … from which decade/century? Is it identical in all fifty states … north-south or the plains into Texas?

Comparable to European right-wingers speaking of preserving “European culture” often narrowed down to “Judeo-Christian” values. European leaders never explain their statements other than it excludes Islam. Whether they are talking about a religion … a preacher … or political groups with a goal of enforcing Sharia law. Due to freedom of expression, all artistic outings, cartoons and speeches/sermons are permitted to spread hatred of which minorities are duped. Nothing was really learned or is now forgotten from the rise of European fascism a century ago.
Oui on June 13, 2016 at 2:52 pm
Sins of the father do not apply to the Orlando nightclub attacker | France24 |

Begining with the standard hailing of the Prophet, Mateen then launches into his message.

“Greetings to the people of Afghanistan, my dear compatriots. You may know about the death of my child, I am really sad,” says Mateen, dressed in a formal black suit, before going on to reiterate, time and again, that he does not understand how and why his son, “a good child, educated, with a wife and children” could have committed such a ghastly deed. “I don’t have any information. I don’t understand. I didn’t know he had oqda inside him,” says Mateen, using a Dari word for bitterness or grievance.

He then proceeds to briefly explain what his son did.

“He went into a gay club where there were boys and girls. He killed them. I am profoundly sad, my heart is bleeding. I say to the American people, I don’t know why he did such a thing during this sacred month of Ramadan. Only God is our judge, it’s not our business as slaves of God. Only God can punish them, not us…May God protect young people and put them on Islam’s right path.”

He continues before ending with a familiar anti-Pakistan rant. “I told the American TV station [NBC] Pakistan is responsible for terrorism and insecurity. Long live the people of Afghanistan, death to Pakistan.”

So much to examine here, where do I begin?

For starters, the Dari term Mateen employs for “gay” is “hamjensbãz” — literally “same-sex fooling around” — which lacks the political correctness of “hamjensgara,” or same-sex orientation.

But then Mateen doesn’t seem like a particularly politically correct man. His declaration that, “Only God can punish” gays though is a telling statement of the latent homophobia prevalent in all too many sections of society.

Let’s be clear: the LGBT community has long complained of homophobia in Islam. The Arab world is not particularly kind on gays. They face lashings in Saudi Arabia and police torture in Egypt. But then Uganda isn’t particularly soft on gays and neither is large chunks of macho, sub-Saharan Africa.

Homophobia for all brands of fundamentalists

As for religion, homophobia is hardly unique to Islam. Fundamentalist Christians, Hindus, Jews and Buddhists display levels of homophobia and it must be addressed and deplored in all forms.

The fine line though is when disapproval is perceived as a license to kill. In the IS group’s so-called caliphate, gay men face a particularly gruesome death: they are thrown off rooftops.

In the jihadist group’s message claiming the Orlando nightclub attack, they note that “one of God’s soldiers” had targeted “the people of Sodom” and enabled him to wreak destruction on “the filthy crusaders”.

When religious texts condone the destruction of a city for the “sin of Sodom,” it’s time to roll out the interfaith bandwagon of warm and fuzzy priests, rabbis, imams, pundits and monks to issue their Kumbaya messages of peace, love and tolerance.
Oui on June 13, 2016 at 2:53 pm
U.S. Gay Rights Activists: Stop Pinkwashing Palestinian Suffering! | Tikkun |

Contrary to Ambassador Oren’s claim, the study’s authors write that “the plight of gay men should have little direct relevance on any of the contentious issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Oren further claimed that “Israel was fighting for gay rights before the 1967 war. Even when terrorists were blowing up our buses and cafes, there was equality for gays.” In fact, sodomy and homosexuality were illegal in Israel until 1988. Tel Aviv law professor Aeyal Gross explained in Haaretz:

Israel did not fight for the rights of gays, not in the sixties nor in the seventies. Only at the end of the eighties and in the nineties, in the wake of vigorous activism on the part of members of the LGBT community and a small number of politicians who supported them, did any progress take place. This included the cancellation of the criminality of homosexual intercourse and the creation of a law and a ruling that would prevent discrimination. Now, said progress…is being appropriated for Israeli hasbara.

It was only thanks to long-time human rights activist, MK Shulamit Aloni, who proposed the bill, that it was signed into law. In the current right-wing political environment, such a law would never be proposed or passed.

While the U.S. president and vice-president have publicly endorsed gay marriage, Haaretz quotes Israel’s finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, saying a few weeks ago, the time isn’t yet right for legalizing gay marriage in Israel. When asked by members of a Likud LGBT caucus whether he would become the first Likud minister to attend Israel’s annual gay pride parade, he appeared embarrassed, noted the date, but refused to make any commitment.

[Source: author Richard Silverstein of Tikun Olam]
Oui on June 13, 2016 at 3:05 pm
Orlando: Blame Guns, Homophobia and Hate, Not Muslims | Tikun Olam |

To those Islamophobes like Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz who are celebrating these killings because they “confirm” their own prejudices, we must remind them that the vast majority of terrorism in this country is perpetrated by white Christians against Blacks, Muslims and Jews. The views of the majority of domestic terrorists are closer to Donald Trump than they are to ISIS or al-Qaeda.

Who among us can say there aren’t 100 white men who could’ve just as easily attacked that club filled with members of the LGBT community. In fact, scores of gays in this country have been killed by just such people.

But we shouldn’t omit his ex-wife’s statements that he was not only regularly abusive to her, but that he was mentally unstable. She’s called him “bipolar” and said he’d had a history of abusing steroids, a condition common to the leader of the Boston Marathon terror attack. His father apparently also suffers from similar delusions. [Links to Washington Post article which is complete bs about support for Taliban in AfPak border region – Oui] In most cases of mass shootings of this sort, even when there is a political or racial factor, mental illness plays a role. Yet, this country spends pitifully little to support mental health services.

Another factor in common between this attack and the Boston bombing was an immigrant Muslim family trying to find a footing in this country and failing to do so. The acculturation process for some of these families is unsuccessful. Thus the children are left to fend for themselves. As a result they flounder, turning to drugs, hardcore religion or crime. The Muslim community, state, local and federal governments should do more to create, or strengthen youth outreach/social programs for at risk immigrant youth.

There will be Israeli security consultants and their GOP friends who will be wagging their fingers saying “I told you so.” If you’d only adopted Israel’s approach to security, you’d avoid these incidents.
Here is Gabriel Sherman, the national editor of New York Magazine:

“At what point do we say we need
to become like Israel and post armed
guards and metal detectors at almost
every public building?”
- JoelDanWalls on June 20, 2016 at 1:47 pm
  
  There are guards–I can’t tell you whether they are armed or not–at many if not all Jewish establishments in Paris. If you visit the Jewish Museum, say, you have to go through the same sort of security rigamarole as in an airport.
  
  I believe you’ll find that guards at synagogues and other Jewish establishments is common in Europe.
  
  Perhaps your focus on Israel is a bit blinkered.
Oui on June 14, 2016 at 7:04 am

Witness: Omar Mateen had visited Pulse nightclub | Orlando Sentinel |

FORT PIERCE — At least four regular customers at the Orlando gay nightclub where a
gunman killed 49 people said Monday that they had seen Omar Mateen there before.

“Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other
times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent,” Ty Smith said.

Smith told the Orlando Sentinel that he saw Mateen inside at least a dozen times.

“We didn’t really talk to him a lot, but I remember him saying things about his dad
at times,” Smith said. “He told us he had a wife and child.”

Another Pulse regular, Kevin West, told the Los Angeles Times that Mateen messaged
him on and off for a year using a gay chat app.

…
Mateen’s second wife, Noor Zahi Salman, was not cooperating with authorities,
according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
on June 14, 2016 at 12:00 pm

Dad came to the US from Afghanistan in the late 70s. What was happening in the late seventies in Afghanistan? Hint: CIA supplying weapons to bin Laden and the Mujahadeen.

The cable network is CIA/ISI.

Refer to the Tsarnaev brothers and their uncle Ruslan who ran a Chechen aid operation out of the address of Graham Fuller, the CIA guy who came up with the Iran-contra idea way back during Reagan’s years. The older brother was connected to the Jamestown Foundation in Dagestan, Jamestown being a CIA entity. The younger brother had a professor who was CIA.

By the way, getting dropped from the FBI watch list is not uncommon if you are ageny-linked and about to commit a really bad crime. Oswald allegedly went to Mexico City six or seven weeks before the JFK assassination. Someone impersonating Oswald went to both the Havana consulate and the Russian embassy seeking visas. So Oswald is being impersonated in Mexico City, going to the twin towers of evil in Langley, USSR and Cuba. A couple days after that the FBI dropped Oswald from their watch list.

When these things happen I ask myself who in the government wants me to be scared. Who?
Marie3 on June 14, 2016 at 12:09 pm

The nightclub was a soft target. Those filled with murderous rage and armed with assault type weapons will always look for such a target and usually those already known to them.

It’s impractical (and economically unfeasible) to harden the soft targets that exist practically everywhere in modern life. Our schools today are already more like prisons that ever before with guards and metal detectors. And still a massacre took place at an elementary school.
Marie3 on June 14, 2016 at 1:36 pm

The Intercept – Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Call for Bombing ISIS After Orlando Shooting that ISIS Didn’t Direct

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reacted to the Orlando shooting with evidence that they can agree on at least one thing: bombing people. Both candidates called for an escalation of the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
…
Clinton’s and Trump’s gusto about doubling down on what the United States is already doing — the U.S.-led coalition has conducted over 12,000 airstrikes against ISIS and other militant groups in Iraq and Syria — was echoed by sitting lawmakers.
…

HRC has also been bleating: Remember 9/12!
on June 15, 2016 at 3:16 pm

Omar Mateen has some remarkable parallels to the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston Marathon bombing) and even Lee Harvey Oswald.

The first is that Mateen’s father has been operating a cable TV show being broadcast to Afghanistan through a CIA/ISI Pakistani propaganda outlet. Do the children of CIA assets just tend to be psychotic and violent? The Tsarnaev brothers had uncle Ruslan, who publicly condemned the young men in the days after the bombing. Ruslan was married to the daughter of Graham Fuller, the CIA muckity muck who was credited with coming up with the idea for Iran-contra back in the 80s. Ruslan used Fuller’s home address to run an “aid organization” for the Chechen rebels in Chechya in the 90s. If you recall, at the time Chechen rebels (a similar movement to al Qaeda and ISIS) were blowing up schools and subways in Russia. Ruslan also has worked with the Agency for International Development, another government agency that is used as cover for the CIA, as well as the oil business in Central Asia.

Both Mateen and the Tsarnaev brothers had multiple people connected with the CIA in their lives in the years approaching their murderous acts. The older Tsarnaev, when he visited Dagestan, had contact with the Jamestown Foundation, a CIA front. At that time Russia had him pegged as trouble. The US intelligence community ignored Russian warnings. The younger Tsarnaev had a professor at college who’d done writing for CIA journals.

Mateen has worked for a private security company that was once Wackenhut, a company that has been working in the margins for our intelligence community going back to at least the 70s. There are books out there about Wackenhut.

In September 1963 someone, either “Oswald” and/or someone imitating Lee Harvey Oswald went to Mexico City and tried to get visas at both the Russian embassy and the Cuban consulate. We know the person who contacted the embassies was not Oswald (you can google the CIA surveillance pictures on google, “fake Oswald Mexico City”) but someone impersonating Oswald.

Unlike what was reported at the time, Oswald was previously known to both the FBI and the CIA, the CIA having a 201 file which was being moved around Langley and the FBI having Oswald on its watch list. Immediately after the Mexico City trip the FBI took Oswald off its watch list. Counterintuitive? Like US intelligence ignored the warnings on the elder Tsarnaev brother when he came back from Dagestan. Just like the FBI took Mateen off its watch list.

What are we to draw from these parallels? That men with relatives who are CIA assets are prone to psychotic violence? That this is a pool of “lone nuts” groomed and sent off to create false flag violence in order to affect American public opinion? That the FBI extends a professional courtesy to the CIA not to keep an eye out for CIA assassins?
- on June 15, 2016 at 3:45 pm
  
  Another interesting coincidence. Mateen, during his rampage, allegedly said he supported Hezbollah and ISIS. They are enemies. It is much like the faked picture of Oswald in his backyard where he holds publications from competing Communist movements in the US.
  
  That is, both alleged assassins seemed to have to real idea of their political beliefs within any movement.
Marie3 on June 22, 2016 at 11:31 am

The picture is beginning to become more cohesive. And shoots down all the initial suppositions. Looking like a toxic brew of personal hurt, anger, and revenge.

Omar Mateen: A U.S. Patriot Gone Astray

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