Photo Credit:
Omar Mateen (left), the American-born son of Afghan parents, murdered 50 people and wounded scores of others in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on May 12, 2016. Mateen pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State just before the attack.

{Originally posted to the Toronto Sun}

Almost 10 years ago, Maclean’s magazine published an essay by Mark Steyn titled, “The future belongs to Islam”.

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In it, he suggested, “the West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it.”

It was an extract from Steyn’s then best-selling book America Alone, where he concluded, “It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it.”

Steyn wrote: “We are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century progressive welfare democracy. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly.”

There was an outcry among Canada’s Islamists, who took Steyn and Maclean’s to the Ontario and British Columbia Human Rights Commissions.

My fellow Sun columnist, Farzana Hassan, and I wrote a rejoinder in Maclean’s titled, “Mark Steyn has a right to be wrong.”

Today, I recognize, Steyn was right and I was wrong.

If there were any doubts the West is abdicating its responsibility to stand up for Western values, the amateur attempts by the FBI to cover up the Islamist nature of the Orlando attack, removed them.

At first, the FBI refused to even mention the fact the Orlando jihadi was inspired by ISIS, but after criticism, released the text of his 911 calls, but not the audio.

It replaced the word “Allah” with “‘God”, despite knowing precise words matter in truth-telling.

It was clearly an attempt to make the attack appear homophobic, not Islamist.

President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton deflected attention from the obvious Islamic nature of the terrorism to a debate about gun control.

An FBI spokesman did the same when he downplayed the role of Islamism in the attack, editorializing that the killer, “does not represent the religion of Islam, but a perverted view, which based on what we know today, was inspired by extremist killers.”

In Toronto, Premier Kathleen Wynne, Canada’s first openly gay premier, also refused to address the Islamist nature of the attack, saying, “one cannot fight homophobia with Islamphobia”, at a vigil for the Orlando victims.

This is nonsense. Orlando was an act of Islamic terror and of Islamofascism, a doctrine of hatred towards the West and what it stands for, including LGBTQ rights.

It holds secular liberal democracy in contempt, hates non-Muslims, degrades women and is racist towards non-Arabs, especially black Africans.

It is a supremacist death cult that has the end times as its ultimate goal.

Chia Barsen, a 32-year old Canadian Marxist, was 10 when his family fled Islamic Iran, political refugees escaping the murderous rule of its barbaric ayatollahs.

Commenting on the liberal left’s reaction to the Oralando massacre, Barsen wrote on his blog:

“Blaming guns for the Islamist murder of 49 people in the Orlando gay club, is like saying that Zyklon B gas was the cause of the Holocausts and not the Nazis. Gun control is a clear and present issue in the U.S. and there are countless episodes of shootings in the U.S. to justify the removal of all guns (not just automatic weapons), from the streets.

“However, piggybacking on the gun control debate and not making any mention of the threat of Political Islam and Islamism, is the furthering of a political agenda and not simple ignorance or apathy.” Exactly.


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Tarek Fatah is a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, a columnist at the Toronto Sun, host of a Sunday afternoon talk show on Toronto's NewsTalk1010 AM Radio, and a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum. He is the author of two award-winning books: Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State and The Jew is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism.