A pattern of anti-gay violence seems to be emerging among a new breed of terrorists hailing from Afghan ethnic or national origin. Ahmad Khan Rahami, the 28-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan and alleged terrorist behind the September 17th attacks in New Jersey and New York that injured 31 people in Manhattan, probably singled out Chelsea for the neighborhood being a gay enclave.
Testimony from Maria Mena, Rahami’s high school girlfriend, confirmed that he was a homophobe who railed against homosexuality. “He would speak often of Western culture and how it was different back home,” Mena told Fox News last week. “How there weren’t homosexuals in Afghanistan.”
Within Islam, homosexuality is regarded as a perverted and sinful deviation from the norm. So institutionalized homophobia has always existed in Islamic society. What’s new is the frontal assault Muslim purists feel by the emergence of a global LGBT movement that is jeopardizing their identity and myopic vision of the world. This is why greater tolerance for LGBT people in the US and across the West, compels ultra-homophobic Muslims to murder and muzzle LGBT people and their gay-friendly allies.
Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old son of immigrants from Afghanistan and Orlando gunmen who killed 49 people last June in the deadliest mass shooting in US history, was a closeted homosexual who couldn’t reconcile his sexuality with his faith. Unable to come out to his family and community, Mateen gravitated to extremism and turned his hypermasculinity and self-loathing into terror when he targeted gays at the Pulse nightclub.
It’s unclear if latent homosexuality mixed with Islamic radicalization led Rahami down the same path as Mateen. Since Rahami is still alive and faces trial, and so long as he doesn’t plead the Fifth, it may be possible to glean if internalized homophobia coupled with Islam’s punitive line on homosexuality were decisive factors in the making of a terrorist.
Regardless of what triggered Mateen and Rahami to carry out their violent rampage, what is clear is that homophobia in Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora is a problem for all of us. For the last three years, I’ve been sounding the warning bells about rejected and repressed LGBT Afghans being recruited into militant Islam. But, my words fell on deaf ears. To turn the tide of jihadi terror tempered by parochial views about sexuality, we must empower LGBT activists to promote a gay-affirmative, sex-positive culture in Muslim communities. Tragically, LGBT people in Muslim-majority countries face an uphill battle in changing attitudes and convincing their compatriots that they have the right to exist let alone be accepted and integrated into the social fabric of their respective societies. Turning a blind eye to the millions of LGBT people suffering in Afghanistan and the tens of millions of their counterparts suppressed across the Muslim-majority world is no longer an option.
The battleground over LGBT rights must be fought and won in the heart of the Muslim-majority world, and there’s no better place than US-occupied Afghanistan to concentrate our efforts in the greatest cultural contest of our times. Once the rainbow flag of the LGBT movement soars over the minarets and mountaintops of Afghanistan, long considered the most isolated and parochial country in the Muslim world, winning the battles in the remaining 73 countries in the East where same-gender relationships are still a crime, becomes practically inevitable.
Making it easier for closeted Afghan homosexuals and other repressed Muslims questioning their sexuality to opt for equality and liberty in this life over the path of Islamic martyrdom and paradise in the afterlife is the best way to protect our national security from such terrorism. It also makes the world freer and safer than it currently is.