Honoring the Victims of Pulse Means Confronting Radical Islamic Terrorism

In 2012, I worked for President Obama’s re-election campaign in Florida. My roots in Democratic politics run deep: I organized pro-labor Democratic clubs in New York City, spent years working on cannabis legalization and criminal justice reform, and became a Democratic nominee for New York City Council in my hometown. I believed then — and still believe — that public service means standing up for human dignity, fair treatment, and freedom.

But there’s a crisis of moral clarity happening in the progressive movement. And nowhere is that clearer today than in how the Pulse nightclub massacre has been remembered — and how its core truth has been buried.

On June 12, 2016, forty-nine LGBT Americans — overwhelmingly Latino — were murdered in cold blood at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. The shooter, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to ISIS while executing his victims. He didn’t act out of confusion or generic hatred. He acted in direct alignment with a violent, extremist interpretation of Islam that seeks to destroy everything we cherish — from gay pride parades to freedom of religion, from women’s education to free and fair elections.

This was not some generic act of hate or lone-wolf outburst. It was an act of jihad — premeditated, ideologically motivated, and aligned with a global movement that targets LGBT people for death.

We were told to “honor them with action.” I agree. But action starts with honesty. And honesty means naming the ideology that drove the slaughter: radical Islamic terrorism. 

Honoring the victims of the Pulse massacre means standing up to radical Islamic terror. Period.

It means acknowledging that there are foreign ideologies and domestic threats that are fundamentally incompatible with the liberties we fight to protect. It means recognizing that while not all Muslims are terrorists, every modern-day jihadist terrorist was radicalized by a network of Islamist theology that we ignore at our own peril.

It means that the Director of the FBI should not be muzzled or constrained by politics when investigating suspected terrorist cells on American soil. It means that mosques preaching hate should not enjoy immunity under the false pretense of religious liberty — just as no Christian or Jewish house of worship would be allowed to incite violence with impunity.

And yes — it means policies like President Trump’s travel ban from jihadist hotbeds. A policy I would have once reflexively opposed, but which I now understand as a necessary, if imperfect, step toward protecting American lives from entry points exploited by jihadist networks. Countries without functioning governments, overrun by terror militias and anti-American ideologies, should not have a clear runway into our neighborhoods, not because of bigotry, but because of basic national security.

Today, a new generation of activists chants “globalize the intifada” at Pride parades. Groups like Queers for Palestine — who would be hunted or executed in Gaza — now openly glorify Hamas and vilify Israel, the only country in the region where LGBT people can live with legal protection and dignity. The cognitive dissonance is staggering — and lethal.

LGBT spaces have increasingly turned hostile to Jews. Pride marches ban Jewish symbols while embracing the flags of regimes that imprison or kill homosexuals. Zionists are labeled colonizers, while Islamist militias are rebranded as freedom fighters. This isn’t justice. It’s moral inversion.

This is not a left vs. right issue. It is a life vs. death issue.  

I didn’t leave the progressive movement because I stopped believing in equality. I left because I refuse to pretend that solidarity includes standing with those who would see us dead. I will not align with a movement that chants liberation slogans while covering up for the ideologies that blew apart 49 LGBT people in a nightclub.

It’s not just cowardice. It’s complicity.

If you’re queer and standing with Hamas, you are not brave. You are a pawn. And sooner or later, you will be expendable to the very cause you champion.

The massacre at Pulse wasn’t just a tragedy. It was a warning. A warning we have ignored to the detriment of our country and her security.  The only way to honor the victims is to take that warning seriously — to name the threat, confront the ideology, and defend the spaces that were built to protect us from precisely this kind of hate.

Dylan Schwartz is Senior Advisor to the Log Cabin Institute and a former democratic political operative and strategist, who now works across the aisle with organizations focused on national security and U.S.-Israel relations.