The unspeakable horror of last week’s mass murder in Orlando has raised many unsettling issues, some of which we reflect on our front page. But one of the most bizarre — along with the idea that the perpetrator’s Islamism was irrelevant — has been the inability of some observers to recognise that it was both a homophobic attack and an Islamist attack. There is a notion in some quarters that it can only be one. But far from being mutually exclusive, murderous hatred of gays is part of the Islamist mindset — as is the desire to kill Jews. In this respect, the reaction to the Orlando murders has similarities with that to the killings in the Paris Hyper Cacher. There were any number of inane remarks then about that being an attack on ‘ordinary people’ — remarks that seemed designed to strip the victims’ Judaism of all relevance, when it was precisely the fact that they were Jewish, and in a kosher shop, that led their killers to murder them. It is depressing and worrying that there are still commentators and politicians who refuse to acknowledge the reality of the threat from radical Islam.
