The bloodbath in Orlando, Florida this week is a grim reminder that terrorism and terrorists will spawn anywhere, anytime. Acts of terrorism do not necessarily follow a predictable pattern or norm.
The attacker in Orlando was of foreign descent, but he was born and bred in the US, went through school not far from where he perpetrated his mayhem, and ostensibly led the humdrum life of an average employee working as a security guard (an irony in itself).
He had a wife and a small kid (he was briefly married to another woman before, but that is normal in this country), and his parents -- immigrants from Afghanistan -- lived in the same city. His neighbours or co-workers never suspected that a monster lived in him.
There have been several mass killings in the US in last five years. In 2012, a gunman shot and killed 20 first-graders and six adults in an elementary school in Connecticut. The shooter later killed himself at the scene.
In 2013, a Navy contractor and former Navy-enlisted man, shot and killed 12 people and engaged police in a running firefight through the sprawling Washington Navy Yard. He was shot and killed by police.
In 2014, a killer in Isla Vista, California, meticulously planned a deadly attack, spending thousands of dollars in order to arm and train himself to kill as many people as possible. Later he killed six people before shooting himself.
In June 2015, a teenager in South Carolina entered a church armed with an assault rifle and mowed down nine people. Same year in October, a student in a community college in Oregon shot to death eight fellow students and a teacher. In November that year, an anti-abortion activist attacked an abortion clinic in Colorado and shot to death three people in that clinic.
It is ironic that in most cases of such terror acts in the name of Islam, be it in Europe or the US, the perpetrators are hardly devout Muslims or pious people. They are either mercenary or psychopaths who have their own motivation to commit these acts
But the deadliest killing happened in December 2015 when a couple descended in an office building in San Bernardino, California armed with bombs and firearms and slaughtered 14 people who were co-workers of one of the killers. The couple was later chased and killed by police when they engaged in fight with police.
The account above does not include many other smaller occurrences of mindless killing in the last five years or the years before. The important fact is that murders by a single individual at a single site are not unknown in this country.
US history, particularly of last 12 years or so, is replete with such incidents of slaughter and murder of innocent people, by individuals whose motives have not been always clear to people or the investigators.
What stands out between other cases of mass killing, and the ones in Orlando or San Bernardino, is the religious identity of the killer or attacker. In both cases, the attackers were Muslim.
In the San Bernardino case, the male attacker, a US-born individual of foreign extraction, was later claimed by the investigators as a radicalised Islamist who had been secretly commiserating with ISIS.
In case of the Orlando calamity, the attacker, also a US-born man of Afghan descent, is claimed to have declared his allegiance to ISIS prior to that attack.
Questions may be asked why the religious identity of the killers in Orlando and San Bernardino were brought into limelight while this subject was not mentioned in other cases of mass shooters, and this may merit all together a separate discussion.
But at a time when ISIS has become a dread of the Western countries (including many Muslim countries), and homegrown terrorism has become commonplace, it is not unusual to associate a terrorist with that dreaded force, particularly if he or she is of Muslim extraction.
The investigators start from this hypothesis and would like to conclude that way unless proven otherwise incontrovertibly.
For Muslims in the US, the Orlando tragedy is a double whammy.
For one, it, again, brings into public eye their religion and co-religionists in a negative way, and focuses on the proneness of their youths to radical thoughts and actions.
On the other, it sharpens the current presidential election campaign, where a rabble-rousing candidate like Donald Trump can gain traction for his campaign rhetoric against Muslims and other minorities by stoking more fear of people citing these acts of terrorism.
No words can denounce enough any act of terrorism, least of all the kind that wiped away 49 young lives in a matter of hours in Orlando. As President Obama said of this incident, it does not matter by what name you call it (radicalism or terrorism), it is a horrific and grossly inhuman act that no religion, race, or orientation can tolerate.
Muslims in the US and all over have condemned this horrible occurrence as they have denounced similar others in the past. But denouncements apart, they also have to recognise the reasons why their community comes into focus when the perpetrator happens to be one of them.
One reason is the frequency with which terrorist acts happen both in the Muslim world and elsewhere in the name of their religion, and the other, the perpetrator blithely boasts of committing these heinous acts for his belief.
It is ironic that in most cases of such terror acts in the name of Islam, be it in Europe or the US, the perpetrators are hardly devout Muslims or pious people. They are either mercenaries or psychopaths who have their own motivation to commit these acts.
In the majority of the lone-wolf cases, the perpetrators are of the same psychological frame as those countless others who slaughtered people in Connecticut, South Carolina, or Washington DC. The latter perpetrators were not tagged to any religion or belief because they did not say so.
It may be relatively easy to wage a war against a known group of war-mongering terrorists such as ISIS or al-Qaeda, but it will not be easy to weed out sick individuals who fall prey to their own delusional ideas and take cover under a belief.
It will take a whole community to keep this vigil to spot and stop such individuals. We hope we can all wake up.
