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US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) made this extraordinary statement about who was responsible for the massacre in Orlando, FL:

“Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, Al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama’s failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq. So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies.”

McCain later tried to backtrack from his comment with this statement:

“I misspoke,” McCain said in a press release. “I did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obama’s national security decisions, not the president himself.”

Let me respectfully disagree with the Senator.  The person responsible for the rise of the Islamic State is former President George W. Bush.  Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Iraq was ruled by Sunni Muslims who comprised 20% of the Iraqi population.  They ruled ruthlessly, subjugating the interests of the Shia population (60% of the total population) and Kurds (20% of the population).  By overthrowing Saddam Hussein and demanding that elections be held, President Bush allowed the Shia to come into control who began to rule just as ruthlessly as the Sunnis had done before.  The Islamic State  is made up of the Iraqi Sunnis who were ousted from power and their objective to to return to power in Iraq (and Syria).   Finally, anyone who believes that Omar Mateen was primarily motivated by Islam needs to examine the evidence more carefully.

On that last point, the evidence about American Muslims (who make up about 1% of the American population) suggests that despite some profound misconceptions by non-Muslims, American Muslims are about as ordinary as every other variety of American.  The Pew Research Center conducted a poll of American Muslims and the graph below clearly indicates that there are few difference between Muslims and non-Muslims in the US.