As you may have noticed today, after years of ignoring the concept of “citizenism,” the mainstream media has suddenly converted en masse to citizenism of the most fundamentalist kind: the Orlando shooter was a U.S. citizen. What more do you need to know?
But, being a curious sort, I’m wondering how his father, Seddique Mir Mateen, got to the United States from Afghanistan so the terrorist could be born an anchor baby in New York in 1987.
The elder Mateen is reminiscent of Clock Boy’s dad, who was constantly running for president of Sudan while managing a chauffeur business in Texas. Seddique Mir Mateen, a Florida resident, recently announced on TV his candidacy for president of Afghanistan. Early accounts of his YouTube speeches make him sound megalomaniacal. But on the other hand, some of his political accusations, such as that the real bad guys in the region are Pakistan’s ISI, strike me as not wholly delusional. I can’t tell yet whether he was always a complete loon or if at one point he might have seemed to somebody in Washington as the kind of potential Afghan politician it might be handy to have on ice in the U.S. in case of regime change in Kabul, the way lots of members of the Karzai family (that provided the new U.S. backed president of Afghanistan after 9/11) were running restaurants in the U.S. before 9/11.
The younger Mateen referenced the Tsarnaev Brothers of the Boston marathon bombing in his call to 9/11 and had earlier claimed to know them. I’m of course reminded of the unanswered question of how the Tsarnaevs (and their buddy Todashev) got certified as refugees. With the Tsarnaevs, it appears likely that their Uncle Ruslan, a Washington DC area lawyer working on pipeline issues, got some strings pulled, perhaps when he was the son-in-law of CIA legend Graham Fuller and they were working on a Chechen resistance front together. The idea that Uncle Ruslan might one day wind up in an Independent Chechnya as the pro-American Energy Minister seems like a not implausible contingency plan.
But there never seems to be much interest in how these people wound up in the U.S. Apparently, it violates the spirit of the penumbra of the Zeroth Amendment to ask how various no-goodniks got here.
