Last Sunday’s massacre at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, has changed the dynamics on terror. The enemy is now among us, hidden in plain sight, and it would be all too easy to see this descending into the kind of witch hunt already happening in Europe.

The political argument around eliminating terror will need to be rewritten, and there are many who will be quick to jump onto the changing narrative to inject their own agendas into it, like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has done.

Much credit is due to President Barack Obama who, in his first address to the American public after the shooting, condemned the violence and promised justice. He never pointed a finger at Islam or the millions of peaceful Muslims worldwide.

Whether Trump or Hillary Clinton becomes the next US President, it is the measured, calm, but firm leadership shown by Obama that will be missed by people around the world whose idea of the US has been shaped by the blundering wars of George W Bush Jr after the 9/11 tragedy.

Unfortunately, this latest tragedy comes in the middle of the presidential election season, a time that is full of confrontational strife between ideologies. The conservatives of America have been led towards a xenophobic and Islamophobic vision by Trump, and it is not hard to imagine a coarse American character emerging from this incident, which will be touted as a validation of Trump’s Islamophobic policy positions.

Let us be honest with ourselves. As much as our Muslim brothers and reasonable leaders and decent human beings out there insist that the people behind such acts cannot claim to be motivated by Islamic beliefs, some people will quite happily paint all Muslims in an evil light as long as the Daesh militants insist on using the name “Islamic State” for their organisation.

At the same time, the tasteless response to the shooting by a few Malaysians is truly a shame on us all. Comments to the effect that the victims were sinners and therefore deserved what they got serve only to encourage the Islamophobes in their belief that there there is no reasoning with Muslims.

This is not to say non-Muslim commenters are absolved. When it takes only a cursory glance at Facebook to find someone expressing deep-seated homophobia in his reaction to the tragedy, something is clearly wrong with some of us.

We all have our biases, and our right to espouse our beliefs, but perhaps we need to take a step back and re-examine ourselves if our first reaction to hearing of a mass shooting is to say, “They deserve it.” No faith teaches hate and hatefulness, and we become unjust to our co-believers when we distort the teachings of whatever religion we espouse.

Now is not the time to condemn, but to pray that this dark turn does not presage what may be worse. Or have Malaysians forgotten that not too long ago there were Daesh militants planning to bomb our public places as well?