In his Atlantic article on â??What ISIS Really Wantsâ? last March, Graeme Wood insisted that â??the Islamic state is Islamic. Very Islamic.â? Woodâ??s detractors have been similarly emphatic, arguing that ISIS is a perversion of the Islamic faith. For Woodâ??s critics, secular politics, far more than religion or religious ideology, is the key to understanding the existence and appeal of jihadist violence.
In the immediate aftermath of the Orlando massacre in June, the same arguments resurfaced. According to one line of thinking, the shooter Omar Mateen was a repressed homosexual and his actions are inexplicable without understanding the psycho-socialâ??and hence fundamentally secularâ??roots of his hatred toward the LGBT community. Correspondingly, â??radical Islamâ? had little to do with the massacre, and Mateenâ??s professed allegiance to ISIS was merely a smokescreen and a way of aggrandizing himself. This would suggest that the Orlando massacre was about secular hate, not religious terror, not radical Islam, not ISIS.
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