This time, the terrorist targeted the LGBTQ community. A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub, not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens, because of their sexual orientation.” The following day at a North Carolina rally Trump said, “We want to live in a country where gay and lesbian Americans and all Americans are safe from radical Islam, which, by the way, wants to murder and has murdered gays and they enslave women.”ĭuring Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention where he accepted his party’s presidential nomination, he said, “Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. In a speech on June 13, the day after the shooting, Trump said, “This is a very dark moment in America’s history.
Trump and other Republicans attempted to use their response to the shooting to argue that they were true pro-LGBTQ advocates because of their support for immigration restrictions aimed at Muslims. The Pulse nightclub shooting was the deadliest attack on LGBTQ people in American history, and liberals and conservatives - including then-presidential candidate Donald Trump - assumed the shooting was based on the victims’ sexual orientation and gender identity. Salman’s attorneys introduced evidence showing that, far from assisting the shooter, she was a victim of her husband’s abuse, including frequent beatings and sexual assault.
Now taste the Islamic state vengeance.” In his final post, he wrote, “In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa.” He had pledged allegiance to ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and during the Pulse shooting posted to Facebook, “You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes. The shooter’s motive was apparently revenge for United States bombing campaigns on ISIS targets in the Middle East. She was acquitted by a jury last Friday, a rare occurrence when most defendants accused of terror charges accept plea deals and the average conviction rate in such cases is above 90 percent. Federal prosecutors argued that Salman had helped her husband plan and orchestrate the attack.
The evidence emerged during the trial of the shooter’s wife, Noor Salman, whom the federal government charged with aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice. Instead, the new evidence suggests, the Pulse nightclub shooting was intended as revenge for US anti-terror policies abroad. This evidence dramatically changes the mass shooting’s narrative politicians and individuals across the political spectrum had positioned it as an anti-LGBTQ hate crime. In fact, he allegedly had no idea Pulse was a gay club, and simply Googled “Orlando nightclubs” after finding that security at his original target, a major shopping and entertainment complex, was too high, as reported by. It’s been nearly two years since the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people - widely believed to be an act of aggression against the club’s LGBTQ clientele and “undeniably a homophobic hate crime.” There’s now conclusive evidence that the shooter wasn’t intending to target LGBTQ people at all.