Box Turtle Bulletin

Los Angeles, LA Pride

Chicago, Halsted at Roscoe

Trump Blames Immigrants For Pulse Night Club Massacre

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee and Trump University fraudster Donald Trump has issued a statement condemning the attack “by a radical Islamic terrorist.” His statement made absolutely no mention whatsoever precisely who or where that attack occurred. (He identified them only as “victims” and “our nation,” respectively.) In the statement, Trump said:

The terrorist, Omar Mir Saddique Mateen, is the son of an immigrant from Afghanistan who openly published his support for the Afghanistani Taliban and even tried to run for President of Afghanistan. According to Pew, 99% of people in Afghanistan support oppressive Sharia Law.

We admit more than 100,000 lifetime migrants from the Middle East each year. Since 9/11, hundreds of migrants and their children have been implicated in terrorism in the United States.

Mateen was born in New York twenty-nine years ago. This suggests that his family was among millions of Afghanis who fled the country during the Soviet invasion. The link Trump provides documents the elder Mateen’s support for the Taliban as part of a larger effort toward unificaiton of Pashtun areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As for Trump’s claim that Mateen tried to run for President, I don’t see it, aside from “dozens of sparsely viewed, rambling YouTube videos portraying himself as an important Afghan analyst and leader.” In one video, “he seems to be pretending to be Afghanistan’s president.”

Well that figures, since Trump is pretending to be a serious presidential candidate.

Trump also reiterated his call for a Muslim ban:

What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the ban. Must be tough

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016

Click here to read Donald Trump’s full statement

Jamaica Plain, Boston

Mateen’s Ex-Wife: “When He Was Angry, He Would Sometimes Rant About Homosexuals”

Sitora Yusufiy, 27 and the ex-wife of Pulse night club shooter Omar Mateen, has come forward to described her two-year abusive marriage to Mateen. She said that when they first met on Myspace in 2008,  and married after a short engagement, ““He was a normal guy, joking, laughing, you know, like having fun.”

Mateen was religious but not radical. Born in New York, Mateen came from an Afghan family but was “Americanized,” Yusufiy said. Yusufiy, who now lives in Colorado, is Uzbekistani but had lived in the United States for nearly a decade before the marriage.

Yusufiy said Mateen desperately wanted to be a policeman and hung out with a lot of cops, often going to the shooting range with them.

But just a few weeks into the marriage, Yusufiy said, Mateen started showing another side, one of anger and control. She said Mateen made her get a job and then took the money she made.

“It was just his personal form on control. He wanted to control me and do whatever he [could] to keep me hostage,” she said.

When he was angry, he would sometimes rant about homosexuals, Yusufiy said.

“In those moments of emotional instability, he would express his anger towards [a] certain culture, homosexuality, because in Islamic culture, it is not really tolerated, homosexuality. And I know at the time he was trying to get his life straight and follow his faith,” she said.

One former co-worker at the Port St. Lucie security firm that employed Matteen confirmed to the New York Times Mateen’s bigotry and erratic behavior:

According to Mr. Gilroy, who said that he had repeatedly complained to G4S, the security company that employed them, Mr. Mateen was a loud, profane presence who was prone to using racial, ethnic and sexual slurs.

Mr. Gilroy, a former police officer in Fort Pierce, described Mr. Mateen as a man who had “issues and just constant anger.”

“He was just agitated about everything, always shaken, always agitated, always mad,” said Mr. Gilroy, who said his relationship with Mr. Mateen became increasingly tense, with Mr. Mateen badgering him with text messages 20 or 30 times a day.

According to the FBI, Mateen had, at various times, expressed admiration for Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, and, just before the attack, ISIS. Observers note the confusing contradictions in those endorsements: all three groups are bitter enemies of each other. According to the Guardian:

The full extent of Mateen’s motivations may have been complex and less clear than immediately apparent, though. A knowledgeable US official told the Guardian that while the federal investigation was in the earliest stages, an initial hypothesis regarding the shooter’s motive leaned closer to a hate crime than an act of terrorism.

“The idea of it being terrorism is not off the table, but it’s probably not the principal approach,” said the official, who would not be identified by name or agency in discussing a fast-moving investigation. “There are other reasons to believe it was motivated toward a very specific kind of community, obviously.”

That investigation was still determining if the shooting was “terrorism or a massive, massive hate crime”, the official said. The official emphasized that all hypotheses were preliminary.

New Orleans, Bourbon Street

Steven Anderson: “50 Less Pedophiles In The World”

Noted anti-gay extremist Steven Anderson, pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, posed a YouTube video celebrating yesterday’s attack on the Pulse night club in Orlando resulting in “fifty sodomites killed.” To Anderson, this comes as both good news and band news:

“The good news is there’s fifty less pedophiles in the world. You know, these homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles. That’s who was a victim here, are a bunch of just disgusting homosexual at a gay bar, okay?”

“But the bad news is this is now going to be used, I’m sure, to push for gun control, where law-abiding normal Americans are not going to be allowed to have guns for self defense. And then I’m sure it’s also going to be used to push an agenda against so-called “hate speech.” So Bible-believing Christian preachers who preach what the Bible actually says about homosexuality – that it’s vile, that it’s disgusting, that they’re reprobates – we’re gonna be blamed. … I’m sure that people are going to start attacking bible-believing Christians because of what this guy did.”

Anderson insisted that everyone who was murdered deserved to die, although that’s not what he would have done. He would have “obeyed the law of the land,” but…

But I will say this: the Bible says that homosexuals should be put to death in Leviticus 20:13. Obviously, it’s not right for someone to just, you know, shoot up the place because that’s not going through the proper channels. But these people all should have been killed anyway but they should have been killed through the proper channels as in, they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed. Because in Leviticus 20:13, God’s perfect law, he put the death penalty on murder and he put the death penalty on homosexuality. That’s what the Bible says. Plain and simple.

…I’m not sad about it. I’m not going to cry about it. As these people were going to die, these fifty people in the gay bar that got shot up, they were going to die of AIDS and syphilis and whatever else. They were all gonna die early anyway. Because homosexuals have a 20 year shorter lifespan than normal people anyway. … At least they’re off the streets. So I’m just trying to look on the bright side.

Minneapolis, Loring Park

Report: Mateen Cased Other Orlando Gay Bars Before the Attack

The East Orlando Post reports:

Micah Bass, owner of the recently opened Revere Nightclub and The M Hotel, informed the East Orlando Post that Mateen had sent him a friend request on Facebook late last week.

“With running The M and Revere, I constantly get requests from LGBT allies, performers, and potential guests who just want to have fun and spend time with family and friends.”

Earlier today, Bass notified the FBI of Mateen’s activity on social media and is reviewing security footage to see if the suspected shooter or any potential accomplices did, in fact, visit the property in the weeks leading up Sunday’s tragedy at Pulse.

…Veteran investigator and former Orlando law enforcement officer James Copenhaver observed that Mateen could have very well investigated several venues before selecting Pulse Nightclub to carry out what Florida Governor Rick Scott has called a “terrorist attack.”

“My training and experience suggest the shooter was scoping out LGBT clubs by friending club owners, club staff, and even customers of the LGBT clubs in the Orlando area on social media.”

San Francisco

British Journalist Walks Off Live TV Over Downplaying of Homophobia

I’m seeing the same trend here in the states, and I’ll have much, much  more to say about this. But here’s Owen Jones walking out of a Sky News panel discussion over the host’s insistence on downplaying the homophobia aspect to yesterday’s mass shooting.

“The issue is I will not have people, as a gay man, appropriating — the people who never speak about gay rights except when this happens if there are Muslims involved. Then they’s jump on the bandwagon and they’ll spam as much bile as they want. And I’m proud to live in a city, one the the greatest cities on the face of the earth whose mayor is a Muslim. He votes for equal rights including equal marriage in defiance of lots of other people and death threats.”

Host Mark Longhurst then brought up the arrest in L.A. of James Wesley Howell who was reportedly preparing to attack the Gay Pride celebration there. He only acknowledged that Howell was not Muslim “as far as we know,” and asked “whether there is, as you say, a hate crime or whether something is being done in the name of religion.” As if there was a difference.

Jones responded: “Can we just be clear, because you say its lunatics and all the rest of it. We’ve got to be clear. If he went into a synagogue and killed innocent Jewish people… People have done that, disgusting anti-Semitic terrorists, we will call it out for what it is. This person is a homophobic terrorist, whatever else he is. Presumably he’s got some twisted view of Islamic fundamentalism to justify his… even though he’s a knuckle-dragging thug and a get. At the end of the day this is a homophobic hate crime as well as terrorism. It as be called out because I have to say on Sky News and lots of other news, there’s not been many LGBT voices I’ve personally heard myself. And people have to understand as LGBT people watching this and elsewhere, they look at something like this and it is one of the worst atrocities committed against LGBT people in the Western world for generations.”

Longhurst continued to insist that the attack was carried out against human beings. “You cannot say this is a worse attack than what happened in Paris.” It was, he said, a crime Host Mark Longhurst interjected and said the crime had been carried out against “human beings” who were “ trying to enjoy themselves, whatever their sexuality.”

“What are you talking about?” Jones exclaimed. “I’m trying to understand the point you’re making. It was a deliberate attack on LGBT people in an LGBT venue. It was a homophobic terrorist attack. Do you understand that? It’s not some abstract… just kind of he picked a random club out of nowhere. He picked a club because it was full of people he regarded as evil. That’s why he picked the club.”

Co-panelist Julia Hartley-Brewer joined the minimization by suggested that the killer “might have equally horrified by me as a gobby woman”.

“Well fuck!,” Jones replied. “Why would you try to deflect?”

“I’m sorry, I just find this the most astonishing thing I’ve ever been involved in on television,” he continued. “If he’d walked into a synagogue and massacred dozens of Jewish people, you wouldn’t be saying what you’re saying now. You’d be saying it was an anti-Semitic attack. This was a deliberate attack on LGBT people. It was a deliberate attack on the LGBT community. It’s bizarre…”

As the panel continued to divert and dissemble, Jones clearly withdrew himself form the discussion. Longhurst then brought up Peter Tachell’s gay rights group Stonewall to introduce the LGBT element on Longhursts’ chosen terms (“Is the danger… that you focus on one particular area and not the whole threat to our modern way of life?”). “I’ve had enough of this,” Jones said as he took off his microphone and walked off the set.

New York, Stonewall

Photo: Joe Jervis

Photo: Joe Jervis

From yesterday’s vigil in front if the Stonewall Inn.

Nashville

We’ll be posting photos of tribute, vigils and rallies throughout the day. A BTB reader Mike sent this one in from Nashville, via the Metro Government’s Facebook page.

Bridges Over Troubled Waters

The city of Little Rock, Arkansas pays tribute to Orlando. Other landmarks paying tribute included:

Minneapolis and St. Paul

Kansas City

The World Trade Center

The top of the Empire State Building remained dark to signify mourning.

Downtown Tulsa’s First Place Tower lit it’s top in a rainbow.

Seattle’s Space Needle

San Francisco City Hall

Tel Aviv City Hall

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

These are the names of the dead as of late last night.

Edward “Top Hat Eddie” Sotomayor, Jr., 34 years old. A brand manager for a travel agency that specializes in gay cruises.

Stanley Almodovar III, 23 years old. A pharmacy tech, originally from Massachusetts. “Always bubbly and super down to earth and such a sweet guy.”

Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20 years old. Friends called him “Omar.” One aunt says he now “dances freely in heaven.”

Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 years old (left). His boyfriend, Drew Leinonen, was also at the night club. Late last night, his mother confirmed that he had died. Drew had established a Gay-Straight Alliance in his high school.

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 years old. Originally from Puerto Rico, he had been married to his husband for about a year.

Peter Ommy Gonzalez-Cruz, 22 years old. Originally from New Jersey. “R.I.P. Peter Ommy. A great person with a beautiful smile.”

Luis S. Vielma, 22 years old. A student at Seminole State College. Worked the “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey” ride at Universal Orlando Resort.

Kimberly”KJ” Morris, 37 years old, a bouncer at Pulse. Friends remembered her dancing and her smile.

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30 years old. “Mommy I love you,” he texted to his mother at 2:06 a.m. “In club they shooting.”

Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 years old. (No photo available as of 10:15 PDT.)

… And 39 others.