Islamic State is using homophobia as a weapon
The debate has now begun over whether Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed at least 49 people in an Orlando, Florida, gay nightclub, was driven by personal homophobia or by political and religious affiliation with Islamic State.
In one sense the debate is moot. Because in the age of keyboard jihadists and Twitter revolutions, the line between personal hatred and state citizenship has all but disappeared. However flimsy Mateen’s allegiances, his act is just the most recent flashpoint in a worldwide clash of political identities, in which homophobia has become a tool of nation-building.
Islamic State has excelled in that by offering instant citizenship to any lone-wolf hater who kills infidels in its name. But it is not alone in using homophobia to cement political identity.
The battle over gay rights has become a political front line in societies as disparate as Gaza and India, Russia and Uganda, Ukraine and Nigeria, places where anti-gay violence, gay “propaganda” bans and other homophobic legislation abound. In 2008, I was witness to another. That summer, bands of self-styled “Hungarian patriots” unleashed a violent attack against the annual Gay Dignity Procession in Budapest. They broke through police barricades and hurled smoke bombs, firecrackers, cobblestones, bottles, acidfilled eggs, rotting food and feces at the marchers. They accosted parade-goers and policemen, beat up a liberal radio reporter and attacked a Roma performer so viciously that the march’s concert was canceled. They slapped and spat at a Socialist politician and smashed the windows of the car carrying the former equality minister and the first openly gay government official. Marchers fled through an underground tunnel to the nearest subway station.
The signs were ominous in the weeks leading up to the 2008 parade.
The Hungarian Self-Defense Movement announced its intent to attack the parade and appealed to “all Hungarians” to “expel the pederast horde once and for all.” A “communiqué” issued by two far-right groups, Hunnia and the 64 Counties Youth Movement, declared: “We will not permit aberrant foreigners of this or that color to force their alien and sick world on Hungary. We hereby publicly declare that we, ourselves, will defend the Hungarian capital.”
The nationalist language, applied to a social gripe, is telling. Hatred was being re- minted as patriotism. Parliamentary members of the far-right Jobbik Party attempted to ban the parade. Later, they introduced legislation to make the “promotion of sexual deviations,” including “homosexuality, transsexuality, transvestitism, bisexuality and pedophile behaviors,” punishable by up to eight years in prison.
The irony is that gay citizens, through such demonstrations as pride parades, and the demonstrators who attack them are both on a quest to declare identity. Here’s one way to look at what happened on the streets of Budapest or Kiev or Orlando: Two assertions of identity collided, with bloody consequences for one of them.
Or the psychological demons of a deranged young man like Mateen. The displacement of deep and complex anxieties into simplistic nationalist scapegoating is a malignant identity vogue that has disfigured the American presidential race, just as it fed a bloodbath in Florida.