Even in the wake of the Orlando massacre, cognitive dissonance prevents the left from acknowledging Islamic homophobia

If someone does something and explicitly tells you why they did it, even if that something is unspeakably evil, when the reasons they give are verifiable and credible, then there's every reason to believe they are telling the truth.

When Hitler directed the murder of 6 million Jews, his motives were never in doubt. Fifteen years before the Holocaust began, Hitler wrote a book, most of which was devoted to expressing his hatred of Jews and his desire to eliminate them. When Nazis were on trial for their lives in the wake of World War 2, many of whom were convicted and executed for their roles in carrying out Hitler's policies of extermination, none of them made the claim, "it didn't happen." Their defense was always, "we were only obeying orders." It's only in the aftermath of those crimes that imbeciles and neo-Nazis, desperately trying to rehabilitate Hitler and Nazism, have denied the reality and the magnitude of the Nazi genocide.

Like Nazi-apologia, there is something very similar and strange happening in the wake of the monstrous mass murder that occurred early Sunday morning at an Orlando gay nightclub, where self-professed ISIS follower Omar Mateen slaughtered 49 club-goers with a semi-automatic rifle.

This is part of a familiar pattern when an act of vicious terrorism is committed by an Islamic terrorist who specifically states that he was inspired by his religious beliefs. Within instants, the left in media and academia commences twisting itself into pretzels to find ways of denying that Islam was a factor in a horrific crime motivated by Islamic teaching. The cognitive dissonance is so striking that they claim to know the killer's motives better than the killer himself.

If instead of being a Muslim, imagine what the media response would be had Mateen been a member of the demented, inbred, "God hates fags" Westboro Baptist church.  Is there any doubt the media would have instantly indicted not just that minuscule, inbred cult with only 40 members, but all of "right-wing evangelical Christianity" for having provoked a mass murder?

Obviously most Muslims in the west are not violent terrorists. Most American and Canadian Muslims do not attend mosque with any regularity. But Omar Mateen was a regular mosque-goer, and there is a critical difference between Islam and Christianity or Judaism in its consideration of homosexuality.

All three Abrahamic religions originally considered homosexuality to be "sinful."  But in practice, many Christian and Jewish denominations embrace gay congregants and have renounced condemnations of homosexuality. Except for a tiny minority, even conservative Christian and Jewish denominations that denounce homosexuality do not advocate harming, killing or persecuting gay people.

Within Islam, the case is completely different. The tolerant branches of Islam, the Ismailis, Druze, Sufis, Ahmadiyya, and Baha'i, are comparatively small sects which combined make up less than 5% of the world's Muslim population. Indeed, the Sufi, Ahmadiyya, and Baha'i communities are regularly persecuted by mainstream Sunni and Shia in Islamic countries, including Iran and Pakistan, where there is no separation between Mosque and State.

Men executed in Iran for being gay

It is not only within radical, or extremist Islam, but in mainstream Islam, the Shia and Sunni sects that make up 95% of the world's Muslims, where homosexuality is condemned in the harshest terms. In mosques all over the world, including in North America and Europe, Imams preach that the appropriate punishment for homosexuality is death, and they mean that literally.

In many Muslim-majority countries, being gay means being guilty of a capital offense. In countries ruled under Islamic Sharia, such as  Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and others, they routinely execute people for being gay.

But in the worldview of the left, mired in regressive, Marxist "Critical Studies" thinking, people are categorized as either oppressor or oppressed, with a particular hierarchy of victimology. In the leftist mind, all Muslims are automatically victims or western imperialism and racism, regardless of where they live, what they look like, or their economic status. This despite the fact that Muslim countries are the most repressive on earth, in which religious and ethnic minorities, gays and women hold fewer rights than in any western country.

But to admit that would mean admitting that their world view is mistaken. It means that people other than only Caucasians are capable of hatred, oppression and persecution. And the people dogmatically attached to their leftist worldview are as committed to it as ISIS recruits are to Islam. So rather than face reality, cognitive dissonance sets in, and they deny it.

In so doing, leftist feminists sell out women's rights, leftist "Queer" activists sell out gay rights, and leftist academics invent false facts and try to draw a moral equivalence between religions which express discomfort about homosexuality and those that kill people for being gay.  Or even more bizarrely, their cognitive dissonance is so pronounced that they will blame Christianity for an atrocity committed by a Muslim in the name of Islam.

All so leftists can congratulate themselves about how supposedly tolerant and progressive they are, and cling on to their twisted, cognitively-impaired worldview.

Omar Mateen had been investigated by the FBI following complaints by his co-workers about comments he made that indicated he was supportive of terrorists. However that investigation was called off because the FBI was afraid of appearing Islamophobic by pursuing it.

When we see the result of that breakdown, it's clear the left's cognitive dissonance about Islam and its homophobia is both contagious and fatal.

The mosque in Ft Pierce Florida attended by Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen pic.twitter.com/4sj0m9gBND

— Dave Lawler (@DavidLawler10) June 12, 2016