The Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crime That Might Not Have Been

Last month’s terrorist attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was universally believed to have been a hate crime targeting the club’s gay patrons. At the time, it made sense; if the attacker had intended to perpetrate a garden-variety assault on a large group of people, he wouldn’t have ended up at a gay establishment purely by chance.

It turns out that assumption might have been incorrect. The FBI has found no evidence that the terrorist chose the Pulse because it catered to a gay clientele. In fact, several of the earliest reports—that the shooter was himself gay, or that he was in the closet—have not been substantiated by any evidence uncovered by law enforcement officials.

Which isn’t to say that he did not deliberately kill dozens of gay people. He just didn’t leave behind any evidence of such intentions. But as the saying goes, absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence.

We know that Islamic terrorists, extremists, and theocrats around the world aren’t known for being gay-friendly. In at least ten Muslim countries, homosexual acts are punishable by death. In other places, private citizens who kill gays go unpunished. I’ve never heard an interpretation of Islam that was pro-gay.

In all likelihood, the Orlando killer was anti-gay in the same way that Islamic terrorists are anti-Christian, anti-Jew, and anti-Western: they see it as their duty to Allah to kill “infidels” and “kafir“.