Orlando mass shooting incident was a “gift” on a silver platter for the presidential nominee of the U.S. Republican Party Donald Trump.
After a few hours of the incident, Trump showed up escalating hate and discrimination against immigrants, especially the ones from “terror hot-spots” as he said. He went even further and demanded stopping all Syrian asylum seekers’ applications that are under scrutiny and cast suspicion on Muslims already living in the U.S. “We have to stop the tremendous flow of Syrian refugees into the United States.,” he said, pointing an accusing finger at them and molding a whole country in such image.
On June 10, 2016 two days before the nightclub massacre, a young singer was killed while she was signing autographs for her fans. The killer’s name wasn’t Omar, so he did not arouse Mr.Trump’s appetite to deliver a speech in which he preaches hate and violence.
According to statistics, 94% of the mass shooting crimes in America were committed by non-Muslim criminals. Back in 2015, three innocents were murdered by a radical killer in their home in Chapel Hill because of their faith. A dental student, his wife and her sister were gunned down next to their house. Such crimes we don’t see on TV nor do politicians make long speeches decrying them.
It is not surprising that Trump rode the wave of condemning the background of the killer rather than the act of killing. Trump sounded so proud that all his accusations in all his speeches went right, including his first rule to bring security to the U.S. by banning immigration, as the shooter was born to Afghan parents regardless of what his ex-wife has repeatedly said in that he was a crazy gay with bipolar disorder.
One of the basic facts in Forensic Science is that the first suspect of any crime is the biggest beneficiary from it. Exploiting people’s fear to achieve political gains would absolutely lead to serious consequences. As the presidential elections get closer, a question has to be raised: whose interest do such horrors serve?
For Trump, Orlando’s latest crime is a celebration of a political interest rather than a tragedy that should be condemned and decried. It gave him his biggest chance to seize upon his one and only story: the threat posed by Muslim immigrants to the U.S., including Syrian refugees.
