22 June 2016

FBI changes 'Allah' to 'God' in Orlando shooter transcript

Yahoo.com has an article about the Orlando shooting and the FBI's changes to the transcript:

When Omar Mateen called 911 during his shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the man pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) and repeated the common Islamic phrase Allah the merciful, but those phrases did not appear in the transcript of the call published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday morning.
On Sunday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the head of the Justice Department, explicitly said the FBI, which is under her jurisdiction, would doctor the text of the transcripts to remove the Islamic State. But more telling is what she did not say; not only were the mentions of ISIS taken out, but the word Allah was altered to read God instead. 
Here is a sample of the transcription:
Orlando Police Dispatcher (OPD)
Shooter (Omar Mateen)
OPD: Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
Omar Mateen: In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficial [in Arabic]
OPD: What?
Omar Mateen: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [in Arabic]. I let you know, I'm in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OPD: What's your name?
Omar Mateen: My name is I pledge allegiance to [omitted].
OPD: OK, What's your name?
Omar Mateen: I pledge allegiance to [omitted] may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of [omitted].

This is quite a revealing alteration. When Chuck Todd asked Lynch what was going to be left out, she responded: "What we're not going to do is further proclaim this man's pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups and further his propaganda." She later said this doctoring was done to "avoid revictimizing those who went through this horror."
How does she explain the alteration of the name Allah? Would it be "revictimizing" survivors to mention the Islamic name of God? Would it be cow-towing to Mateen's "propaganda"? Or maybe it would suggest the bare obvious fact that Omar Mateen did the evils that he did in the name of Islam and the Muslim deity, whose name is Allah.
You could argue that the FBI was merely translating the Arabic word for God into the English word for God, but that would be like translating the Christian God into Krishna or the Hebrew G-d into Jupiter. It is not a pure translation, because the different names have different meanings, even in the same language.
No, they translated Allah into God in order to silence the unavoidable truth, that the horrid murders in Orlando were part of radical Islamic terror, not just some lone wolf totally unconnected to that specific religion.
Ironically, this strategy is like to reinforce the impact of ISIS, not downplay the organization. President Obama's now-explicitly-stated policy is refusing to use the words "radical Islamic terror" as if it were the ideology-that-must-not-be-named.
Rico says that, as a notional character, it doesn't really matter what you call it/him/her, but apparently Allah is not merciful to gays... (And isn't 'cow-towing' a bit racist, too?)

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