The New York Times allowed barely a day to elapse before it sought to blame the Orlando terror attack on the National Rifle Association (NRA) as columnist Roger Cohen argued in a column filed on Monday that the Brexit movement, the NRA, and Donald Trump have contributed with ISIS to a world that encourages such acts of violence.
Right off the top, Cohen linked the ISIS sympathizing shooter to Brexit, Marine Le Pen in France, and Trump:
Omar Mateen, the Florida shooter who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, just ushered Donald Trump to the White House, Britain out of the European Union, Marine Le Pen to the French presidency, and the world into a downward spiral of escalating violence.
Cohen then dug the hole even further when he compared Mateen to “the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist” who shot the Archduke Ferdinand that “ignited World War I” just as “Mateen has set a spark to a time of inflammable anger.”
In the only other nod to the upcoming vote in the United Kingdom to leave or stay in the European Union (E.U.), Cohen bemoaned: “Trump and “Brexit” represent action — any action — to shake things up. They are, to their supporters, the comeuppance smug elites deserve.”
The columnist properly highlighted for the next few paragraphs how Islam and specifically radical Islam abhor homosexuality of any kind and this conflict with “[l]iberal Western sexual mores...incubates explosive violence.”
>>Find all NewsBusters posts on the Orlando terror attack here<<
“It is poisonous to blame all the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims for this crisis of their religion. Trump’s self-congratulatory reiteration of his call for a temporary ban on non-American Muslims entering the United States exemplifies his violence-tinged politics of division,” he complained.
Maintaining that it’s “dangerous to ignore or belittle the potency of ISIS ideology...and the broader crisis of Islam,” Cohen moved onto the absurd linkage between the NRA and the actions of Mateen:
Mateen demonstrated again just how potent the mix of ISIS and National Rifle Association ideology is. America is the perfect setting for “lone wolf” ISIS followers because they have access to the weapons they need to do their worst. Despite having been investigated twice in recent years by the F.B.I. for possible ties to terrorism, Mateen was able to walk into a Florida gun dealership recently, and acquire a “long gun” and a pistol. This, by any reasonable standard, is madness.
Not surprisingly, he smeared the country’s gun laws as “an aberration” proving that “why lax American gun laws make American lives cheap.”
Along with lamenting that he “hope[s] for the best but fear the victory of the politics of anger in America and Europe,” Cohen concluded his piece full of scattering thoughts by also claiming that the Obama administration’s inaction in Syria has had massive reverberations across the globe for the worse:
Yes, to have actively done nothing in Syria over more than five years of war — so allowing part of the country to become an ISIS stronghold, contributing to a massive refugee crisis in Europe, acquiescing to slaughter and displacement on a devastating scale, undermining America’s word in the world, and granting open season for President Vladimir Putin to strut his stuff — amounts to the greatest foreign policy failure of the Obama administration.
Not surprisingly, NewsBusters archives show that Cohen has a history of making such statements. While he has been tough on the Obama administration’s handling of Syria, he attacked Republicans in the aftermath of the deadly 2011 shooting at a camp in Norway for being “ideological fellow travelers” with the now-convicted murderer.
