The Orlando attack and the starfish story

Last updated on: June 13, 2016 at 10:32 am by Jane the Actuary

The Orlando attack and the starfish story 2016-06-13T10:32:59-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So here’s the deal: I spent all of Saturday travelling; Sunday noontime (UK time) we arrived at our destination, tried to fight back jet lag to walk around some, then came home for dinner and aimlessly watched TV until I crashed and sent the kids, who’d gotten their second wind, to bed. I’d checked twitter a bit via my phone, but hadn’t logged in on the computer, which I now have.

And I’ve read a bit of the CNN reporting on Orlando. 50 people dead, though their “timeline” doesn’t really provide much explanation; it describes the situation as being perceived of as a hostage situation, with the police waiting several hours to position themselves; then, ultimately, they announce the death toll. Did the gunman kill these people during this wait time, or in a final firefight? It’s not clear to me.

Also according to my twitter feed, there was a fight brewing with the Left focusing on a gun control angle and the Right tweeting anger that the Left was denying the role of ISIS and Muslim hate of homosexuality. But maybe that was just a matter of a few fools being retweeted repeatedly, as this morning CNN doesn’t hesitate to call it “an act of hate” and feature as their top article, the ISIS War on Homosexuality.

And here’s the problem:

I’m in London right now. We took the Tube into the city from the airport; it was economical and not much trouble. Now, the last (and only other) time I’d been in London was in 1992, and at the time there were still all manner of warnings about unattended items, given the ongoing risk of IRA bombings.

With the IRA, the answer to the question “what do they want?” was pretty clear: independence for Northern Ireland. And the government, while neither directly negotiating with the IRA nor making concessions to them, did nonetheless develop a political reconcilation process and more autonomy in government that, from what I understand, has greatly improved the situation (though, again, to my understanding, the IRA is still around, but seen as more a criminal gang than anything else).

With extremist Islam?

There were suggestions, e.g., after the Bataclan attack, that ISIS was strategically trying to get the French in particular and the West in general, to cease their intervention in Iraq and Syria. There were even assertions after Brussels that these attacks were the dying gasp of a weakened ISIS.

But I think it’s safe to say that the fundamental reason why the killers in Bataclan, Brussels, San Bernadino, and now Orlando killed, was nothing strategic, but “merely” in order to kill Westerners.

It’s the Starfish story, in reverse. Here’s its telling, from Goodreads:

“Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.

One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

He came closer still and called out “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?”

The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.”

“I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” asked the somewhat startled wise man.

To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.”

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, “But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!”

At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said,
“It made a difference for that one.”

If the objective of extremist Islam is simply to “fight the West,” if it’s irrelevant to them whether harming or killing any individual Westerner makes a difference on a global, strategic scale, because it “made a difference for that one,” than this is a far more difficult situation to fix.

UPDATE: Well, turns out there is a significant divide. My left-wing friends are sharing on facebook articles and memes with two messages: first, that it’s all about the need for more gun control, and, second, insofar as this was an attack on gay men, it still has nothing to do with Muslims, but with an anti-gay animus of which Christians and Muslims are guilty in equal measure.

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