Video: The Muslim Guy calls Orlando shootings a "homophobic mass murder"

Arsalan Iftikhar has said what's been on the minds of some people in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando, Florida.

Iftikhar, a lawyer and author of Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Theatens Our Freedoms, called the tragedy "a clear act of homophobic mass murder".

Speaking to Tavis Smiley on PBS, Iftikhar noted that this perpetrator of "horrific homophobic mass murder was somebody named Omar Mateen and claimed that he supported ISIS in his 9-1-1 call".

"It's one of these things that if this was a white Christian dude who had committed this act of homophobic mass murder, we kind of would have probably just brushed it off of our collective shoulders as just another mass murder in America," Iftikhar said. "But with the fact that this was an olive-skinned man with a foreign-sounding name, you know, it's going to add a lot of different layers to the ongoing conversations that we're going to have as a country."

Iftikhar, senior editor of the Islamic Monthly, operates the Muslim Guy website. He pointed out to Smiley that many acts of homophobic violence in the past have been perpetrated by Christian zealots.

It's worth noting that Mateen had made several trips to the Pulse nightclub before he went on his deadly shooting rampage.

Is the shadow at the root of homophobic violence? 

Following the gay-bashing murder of Vancouver photographer Aaron Webster in Stanley Park in 2001, the Straight interviewed Montreal-based Jungian therapist and author Guy Corneau.  

Corneau said at the time that "homophobia is motivated by a homosexual dimension." And he declared that within some men's groups, some straight men "have very intense projections against the gay men".

He explained that straight men may lash out because they are “very much afraid of aspects of themselves that are too sensitive”, often because this was forbidden or discouraged within their families as they grew up.

“So they started to repress it within themselves in order to be recognized as real men,” Corneau said.

In effect, they're projecting parts of themselves that they won't acknowledge onto others.

In Jungian psychology, the "shadow" is the part of a person's unconscious Self that the conscious personality cannot acknowledge.

According to Jungians, people become extremely irritated in the presence of personality traits that they've hidden within their own shadows. And many believe this is at the root of intense homophobia.

"The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself," Jung wrote.