Year: 2013

That’s what the AP is now reporting about the motives of the Boston bombers. I should caution that this doesn’t preclude some kind of interaction by Tamerlan with terrrorist elements when he visited Russia – and the evidence searches continue. But faith – especially fundamentalist, violent strains of Islam – is by itself a sufficient explanation. Many don’t understand this. But, as anyone with familiarity with strong religious faith will tell you, there are few things more powerful.

Novelist Rolf Dobelli claims that “news is bad for your health, very bad for your mental faculties, and bad for your emotional state.”  Madeleine Bunting elaborates:

The web may have unleashed infinite possibilities of information and speed, but it still has to be absorbed, assimilated and considered by our clunky old brains if we are to develop any insight or understanding. It’s these last two which are now scarce, and crucially, what both require is concentration. The ability to focus, to persist with complexity and to consider ambiguity or uncertainty: these are the mental abilities we put at risk by flitting from one story to another.

Dreher pleads guilty:

What’s important to keep in mind here is that he is not saying that ignorance is bliss, but rather that the massive consumption of information harms us and our ability to thrive in a number of ways. I went into this article ready to make fun of it, and then saw myself reflected back to me in a way that I recognized, and wasn’t quite prepared for.

Marc Champion argues that, for “the Chechen nationalist cause, a terrorist attack in the U.S. carried out by Chechens is an unmitigated disaster”:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought for years to portray the Chechen conflict as purely a problem of jihadi terrorism, directly equivalent to al-Qaeda. He has urged the U.S. and Europe to join him in fighting this scourge shoulder-to-shoulder, rather than quibble over human-rights abuses committed by Russian forces in Chechnya. Putin never quite succeeded in selling his simple Chechnya-as-counterterrorist-problem narrative.

Julia Ioffe explains how Putin sees terrorism:

To Putin, the Taliban and the Chechen separatists, the Salafis and Wahabis, Hamas and the Free Syrian Army are all one. It is why he can be friendly both with Bibi Netanyahu and with Bashar al-Assad: He feels their pain, he fights their fight at home. In fact, his presidency was baptized by the fire of domestic terrorism and war against an Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus. His subjects and his capital have been attacked many times, most recently in March 2010, when two young women from Dagestan blew themselves up in the Moscow metro during the morning rush hour.

It was about the term Islamophobia – a conflation, in my mind, of legitimate and important secular criticism of Islam with racist, xenophobic bigotry. I think there’s a difference between these two phenomena – and in the wake of the Boston bombings, I can’t think of a better time to re-examine the issue. Here is the email exchange between Sam and Glenn that prompted this long piece of self-defense by Sam. My favorite point from Sam:

[E]ven if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society.

How can one seriously deny that? All religions contain elements of this kind of fanaticism. But Islam’s fanatical side – from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs – is more murderous than most.