Year: 2013

A reader responds to me and this reader:

Here’s the counter point: If you do something like this, if you fuck with us, we will shut down a major city, stop everything, and hunt you down.

Not sure which one is correct.

Me neither. But if your goal is to gain attention, it worked.

(Image: From a collection of before-and-after shots in Boston)

A reader backs me up against the dissenter:

I think your reader who pointed out the relatively small number of Muslims worldwide actively involved with terrorism is deliberately missing the forest for the trees when it comes to Islamic extremism. The real issue it seems to me is not that the Muslim faith in the abstract is any more or less violent or oppressive than Christianity or any other religion, but rather that in the modern world, the only examples of theocratic government currently being sustained happen to be built upon Islam rather than anything else.

When a religious doctrine and a polity become one and the same, the kind of horrifyingly oppressive regimes we see around the world that foment and legitimize the fundamentalism of these latest terrorists is almost guaranteed. I remember reading something on this blog before about how fatwas against cartoonists who depict Mohammad are justified by some in part because of a lack of understanding of free speech, that Muslims under theocratic rule assume that if those cartoonists weren’t speaking for our government, than our government would silence them. It’s just an example of how these two governing philosophies, ours and that of say Saudi Arabia or Iran, can’t coexist peacefully.

Regardless of whether or not these particular terrorists were tied to any larger group or just influenced by the same rhetoric, this kind of violence will continue for as long as the separation of church and state is a foreign concept to so much of the world.

That’s what I mean by a religious war. It’s war between the extremes of fundamentalist Islam and the free, secular West. That war can exist inside the mind of a single young fanatic who, merely with access to the web and guns and pressure cookers, can stop the world in its tracks. Or it can take the form of sectarian violence in Iraq.

My reader is correct that this is not reducible to Islam in all its breadth and complexity and history. But it cannot be understood at all without grasping the fundamentalist Jihadist mindset. The uncle of the two Jihadists could not be more emphatic that he as a Muslim feels utterly violated and offended by what these losers did. He says he feels ashamed. He is a Muslim as well. And he is an American through and through.

We have to make a simple distinction: between being a Muslim and being an apocalyptic self-proclaimed Jihadist. But the latter exist, are very real, and are inspired by a toxic distortion of Islam.

The Dish pulled an all-nighter last night, with Chas and Chris in shifts. For a vivid sense of how all this madness unfolded, just keep scrolling. In particular this post from 4.38 am captures the night as it happened.

Desolate Harvard Square. #boston #ghosttown @wcbv @cnn @cnnbrk twitter.com/someaunty/stat…

— Semonti حسين (@someaunty) April 19, 2013

EJ Graff is on lockdown in Cambridge:

What we have here is a metro-region-wide snow day without the snow. It’s too gorgeous to stay inside but we’re not allowed to go out. I think I understand, now, how people live in places like Israel and just keep going about their business. You simply can’t stay on high alert at all times. The dog needs to poop; it’s too nice to stay inside; there’s still work to be done. A mile away there might be a shoot-out, but they’re not aiming at you. Life calls. At the same time I can’t tear myself away from the TV, the radio, and Twitter. I’m watching what’s happening in my town just like the rest of you, although it’s freaky to see all those cops lined up at the mall where I’ve been hundreds of times, picking up a prescription or getting a bargain at the Gap Outlet or buying pansies for the yard. And instead of listening to the blatherers on network news I’m at least watching local reporters who know the landscape, who, instead of saying “Watertown” say “the Arsenal mall” and know which side of Arsenal Street they’re worried about. And instead of saying they’re descending on a house in Cambridge, they give an address on Norfolk Street, just outside of Inman Square so that I can picture the restaurant around the corner, the one with the great ribs.

Allahpundit wonders if shutting down the Boston area is an overreaction:

You don’t want people milling about in a park when there’s a guy with a suicide vest, guns, and ammo on the loose. But then, murder suspects are on the loose all the time in big cities and nothing shuts down for them, even though in theory they’re just as likely to go out in a blaze of nutty glory among a crowd. If you’re an aspiring terrorist, knowing that you can shut down a city for a day must be encouraging.

I take Allahpundit’s point. If we discover this is a function of two twenty-something loser religious fanatics, what kind of precedent are we setting?

Shafer takes the tabloid to task for a week of terrible reporting:

Although Murdoch ran Murdochian tabloids in Chicago, San Antonio and Boston in addition to New York, his fun-over-facts formula has never really taken root in America, causing his U.S. tabloid portfolio to wither to just the Post long ago. And it’s not like the Post has taken root in New York. It has survived for decades on Murdoch subsidies, which the New York Times recently put at an estimated $110 million a year.

Curiously, the Post’s extreme, almost defiant inaccuracy has united America’s armchair media critics like little else. It can hardly be denied that the racy Post has pointed the way for decades toward an info-entertainment hybrid that many have followed. This week, at least, in its stunning contempt for fact, it has defined the basement into which no media outlet that wants respect wishes to descend.

Reddit has apologized for its errors. When will the Post?

A reader writes:

There are 1.6 Billion-with-a-B Muslims in the world. Less than 100 have successfully carried out an attack that killed US civilians. Even at the most generous estimate, there are less than 25,000 active members of Al-Quaeda. That’s 0.00000015% of the Muslim population. There are rogue ideologies, savage ideas floating around the world, easily accessible, and yet how many people have actually gone on to apply those ideas to kill others?

Here’s another fact: 1.7 million ethnic Chechens, but only 2 of them have attacked the US. And those 2 were born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, as were their entire family for one generation, having been deported from Chechnya in 1944, and never lived in Chechnya during the conflicts there. Their family moved to Dagestan for less than a year in 2001, after which they became residents of the US at the ages of 8 and 15. They lived here for 11 years, studied here, wrestled and boxed here, graduated from school here, and one of them, Tamerlan, married a Christian woman and had a child HERE, according to his aunt, who was interviewed on NPR. Whatever part of their lives inspired them to take this action, and WE DON’T KNOW if it had anything to do with their reading of Islam, they got those ideas HERE, in the US, on US soil, as US residents.

Would you characterize Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and the militia movement they were associated with as being “at war” with the US? If anything, those men can be said to have been “at war” with EVERYONE, including the 19 children and hundreds of others that they murdered. These men and their ilk are murderers, not soldiers, and what they have done doesn’t deserve the dignity of cloaking it as some part of a larger ideological struggle. They killed because they could. Because they wanted to. And they are enemies of all humanity.

A reader writes:

I graduated a year before Dzhokhar who we all knew as Jahar, and while I wasn’t very close with him, I knew him fairly well. While it seems like every time this happens people say I can’t believe this happened, this truly is a case where the personality and the behavior don’t seem to match up. Jahar was quiet, but fairly social. I played basketball with him on numerous times, he came to parties, smoked weed with me and many of my friends and was always cheerful.

My feeling is that the reason that Jahar was involved has entirely to do with his brother. I’ve maybe met his brother once, but his brother used to be a good friend of my friend’s brother. I remember hearing recently that he had settled down, had a child, and had become fairly religious but didn’t think anything of it. Given that his brother essentially raised him I think this is an awful case of evil being perpetuated because of the trust and love Jahar had for his brother. I only pray that more bloodshed doesn’t come from this awful set of tragedies.

The reader also identifies this account as Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweet above was sent from it the day of the bombing. Gawker takes a closer look at the account.

A reader under lockdown in Brookline writes:

A religious war? Who really knows? These two remind me more of the Columbine killers than jihadis. Angry, mentally ill, alienated, disaffected, frustrated – some combination of all that – turning to religion to justify their will to anger and destruction, as opposed to turning to violence out of religious zeal.

That photo of the younger one, in the white hat, turning the corner after the second bomb went off behind him – it’s chilling. They’d lived here for years. They wanted to kill their neighbors. I’m not surprised they didn’t leave town. This was personal. And they have brought the whole city to a standstill in their final stand. What more power could two otherwise inconsequential, marginal men hope to wield?

This evidence suggests that kind of profile may well be part of the mix here:

The [car-jacked] driver, who was released unharmed on Memorial Drive, told police that the brothers had bragged to him that they were the marathon bombers, law enforcement authorities said.

And they were forcing him to stop at ATMs to get cash? After a stick-up at a 7/11? Why did they need money rather than merely fleeing?