Month: April 2013

Jahars backpack was found in his apartment after bombing? Is that his backpack in the 4th pic? #FreeJaharnydailynews.com/news/national/…

— Evan Stark (@IamEvan_S) April 23, 2013

Spencer Ackerman notices the instant emergence of claims of the Tsarnaevs’ innocence and a cover-up in Boston:

The #freejahar hashtag on Twitter is about what you’d expect after the most highly publicized manhunt in the country. It’s a mix of conspiracy theories, sympathy for Tsarnaev and skepticism of the official narrative surrounding the 19-year old’s arrest. Much of it is consumed with an effort to crowdsource Tsarnaev’s exoneration, pointing to photos from the scene and speculating about them — similar to what took place on 4Chan and Reddit to hunt the bombing perpetrators.

“He’s fucking innocent. If he were “guilty”, it wouldn’t take this long to fucking prove it, and there would actually be evidence,” says one supporter, although the government has yet to charge the incapacitated, hospitalized Tsarnaev with a crime.

Meanwhile, in contrast, the anti-American extremists are laying low:

[Online extremism researcher Jarret] Brachman and others believe that the unclear motivations of the bomb suspects place a damper on the online jihadi forums’ ability to claim Boston as a success. That’s despite the mystique of the young Tsarnaev nearly escaping a huge Friday manhunt; and, if he is proven to be one of the culprits, the ability to construct bombs that killed three and wounded over 180. But the U.S. government has to be similarly cautious about how to combat any popular mythos, like the hashtags, developing around Tsarnaev.

“We are dealing with conspiratorially minded individuals who don’t believe anything the government says anyway,” says Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism researcher at Stanford University. “The simplest and most effective strategy is probably to highlight the suffering caused by the bombs. Let them see the injured women and children. The most hardcore extremists won’t care, but some fence-sitters might.”

Bill Maher backs me up. I’m not Islamophobic; I’m trying to tell the truth and understand what happened last week. A reader chimes in:

Here’s a quote from Tocqueville, in Democracy in America:

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

This is a parallel point to the question of violence, or at least Tocqueville is not directly addressing the issue of violence, but it’s not hard to make the connection. Politics is a realm of coercion; the state has a monopoly on violence, as we’re taught in introductory political science courses. Jesus opts out of that whole system. He never sought political power. He never was a law-giver. He founded no political regime. He claimed no direct authority over any land or people. Indeed, he was sacrificed at the hands of the reigning political power.

Tocqueville’s point is that because Jesus was in this sense apolitical (along with not pronouncing on matters of science), Christianity has no intrinsic reason to be in conflict with modernity.

Because Jesus laid down no precise pattern for political order, it need not fear the coming of democracy. Because Jesus taught love, rather than scientific theories, nothing Jesus said contradicts what we know through the advance of science. Followers of Jesus, for Tocqueville, can adapt, can engage the age in which they live with a certain openness, rather than hunker down with rage and suspicion. He thought that this wasn’t the case for Islam, not because it was intrinsically violent (neither he nor you are arguing for that) but because the circumstances of Islam’s founding set in motion certain problems that were bound to be exacerbated by modernity.

It always is difficult, even foolish, to draw a straight line from the origins of a religious tradition to contemporary events. But it also is a mistake to pretend a religion’s point of departure matters not at all. For Christians, however hypocritically or poorly they follow Jesus, the witness of Jesus in the Gospels really is a rebuke to violence and political striving. It always is there as a corrective, and throughout Church history, however corrupt Christian institutions have become, Jesus’s life has inspired movements of renewal and repentance. That is worth noting, as you have. It’s not entirely clear such an unambiguous witness from Islam’s founder exists to perform the same function.

That’s putting it diplomatically.

Many readers are upset with this post:

Wow, Andrew. I’ve been with you since 2007, and I can’t recall reading a more blatantly ridiculous statement from you than this one: “And when will they grasp that a religion that does not entirely eschew violence (like the Gospels or Buddhism) will likely produce violence when its extremist loners seek meaning in a bewildering multicultural modern world?”

You know it’s bullshit too. Because otherwise you would’ve said “Christianity” instead of “the Gospels,” keeping it consistent with your blanket characterizations of Buddhism and Islam. But you knew you couldn’t, because of Christianity’s and the Old Testament’s indisputable record of violence, which refutes your narrative that doctrine was the primary cause.

And otherwise you wouldn’t have qualified it with that long modifier of producing violence “when its extremist loners seek meaning in a bewildering multicultural modern world.” How many contingencies do you have to stuff into the interpretation and practice of a religion before you realize those contingencies matter a hell of a lot more than the words in the document everyone’s reading into in whatever way suits their condition? What a logically, linguistically, and sociologically inept attempt to baldly enforce your double standards of religious causation upon your readers.

I do not write things I know are “bullshit.” They may be, but I write in good faith. Perhaps I should have put it this way: All religion, including Christianity, is susceptible to the violence associated with tribalism and fundamentalism. Christianity’s murderousness through the ages is a matter of historical fact, from the Crusades to the Inquisition and beyond.

What distinguishes Islam is that its founder practiced violence, whereas Jesus quite obviously favored the exact opposite – nonviolence to the point of accepting one’s own death. Unlike Christianity, but like Judaism, Islam also claims sacred land, and, along with extremist forms of Judaism, the divine right to repel intruders from it. Religion is dangerous enough. A religion founded by a violent figure, with territorial claims, and whose values are at direct odds with modernity is extra-dangerous. Which other major world religion believes that apostates should be killed? Or regards negative depictions of the Prophet as worthy of a death sentence? As I wrote more than a decade ago now:

The terrorists’ strain of Islam is clearly not shared by most Muslims and is deeply unrepresentative of Islam’s glorious, civilized and peaceful past. But it surely represents a part of Islam — a radical, fundamentalist part — that simply cannot be ignored or denied.

Another reader:

What is “Jihad”? It’s only a religious war in the minds of those who believe that it is. Do we need to broadcast this to people who may be susceptible? Can’t we fight this war without feeding the enemy’s propaganda machine? My worry is that using Jihad/religious war is going to do two things:

1. Help radicalize more people

2. Rev up the right wing into the frenzy we saw post 9-11, which makes us lose our heads and do dumb things, and also reinforcing point No. 1 – it’s a self fulfilling prophecy: “See, the West is after us. Fight the infidels, etc.”

I think this older brother absorbed these radical ideas through osmosis – speaking to a radicalized (but not a member of a radical group) person, all the messaging in the media/Internet, etc., visiting Russia and seeing/experiencing it. But there does not seem to be a direct link to a radical group, where he was directly trained, was meeting with a group, etc. Maybe we just haven’t learned that yet, but until then, we should not jump to conclusions. It seems to me, media outlets calling this a religious war/Jihad are only going to make these people more susceptible to this stuff and give them  greater justification for their feelings and actions.

If I were writing to maximize public safety, I would minimize the religious aspects of this terror attack. But I am writing in order to tell the truth as best I can. Another reader:

It’s terrifying to me that you can write sentences like: “Legally, the case for the presumption of innocence is absolutely right. But come on.”

“But come on” was the animating logic of the drumbeat for war in Iraq. It was the ideological territory of Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Co. It was why Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib happened. “But come on” says, to me: “I know I can’t justify this with reason so I’m going to appeal to a general sense of hysteria.”

But that is precisely why we have these laws and safeguards in the first place. Mirandizing a suspect, presuming innocence and so on were not primarily intended for the low-key cases that take place in America every day. No, they were in large part designed specifically for moments such as this, to prevent a nation in the throes of a huge emotional overreaction (more on that in a moment) from stepping out of bounds. “But come on” represents precisely the arbitrary, emotional desire for overreach that our Constitution and legal system was specifically supposed to neutralize.

If I had simply said the words “come on” and not followed them with a superfluity of evidence, my reader might have a point. But I didn’t.

Tracy Clark-Flory examines the “Best Little Boy in the World” hypothesis:

This theory holds that closeted young men in bigoted environments often respond by overachieving in certain areas, like sports or academics — the idea being that it’s an adaptive means of finding a sense of self-worth where they can. It can also serve to distract from their sexuality: As Andrew Tobias wrote in his 1976 memoir, “The Best Little Boy in the World,” a key “line of defense” was his endless list of activities. “No one could expect me to be out dating … when I had a list of 17 urgent projects to complete,” he wrote.

Despite the prevalence of this idea in gay coming-of-age narratives, it’s never been tested empirically, until now.

In a study recently published in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology, researchers interviewed 195 male colleges students who identified as either heterosexual or a “sexual minority.” They found that the sexual minority men based their sense of self-worth on “academics,” “appearance” and “competition” more so than the straight guys. Interestingly, the amount of time the gay men had spent hiding their sexual identity positively predicted their investment in these areas. The researchers also developed a way to objectively measure the amount of stigma each participant faced in their particular environment by evaluating their home state’s general stance toward sexual minorities. That measure of stigma also positively “predicted the degree to which young sexual minority men sought self-worth through competition.”

For what it’s worth, I fit the model pretty perfectly – and my high school helped. Each class would be graded in every subject every month and then a list would be posted ranking everyone in the class. The first time this happened, after my first month at the school, I was stunned to find out that I was in the top position. Stunned and suddenly proud. Staying there became my over-arching goal for the rest of my high school life. I buried my way into books to prove my self-worth … and to distract attention from my sexual orientation. It worked: I was labeled a nerd rather than a fag – or, in the original English, a “swot” rather than a “poof.”

And those patterns have not truly changed – I’m just more aware of them. Why am I still trying to push the envelope in new media – and risking my own money – when I could have found a more comfortable perch writing somewhere? Why do I still need to prove something every day? Part is obviously an attempt to gain self-worth after homophobia had done its silent, brutal work on my seven-year-old soul. “Does God know everything about you – everything?” I once asked my mum, according to her (I don’t recall the exchange). She said: “Yes, of course. Everything.” I replied, “Then there’s no hope for me, mum.”

But it’s also a positive desire not to allow such prejudice affect you, to break through certain barriers, to push yourself to be a living impediment to homophobic prejudice. One extremely insightful book has been written about this: The Velvet Rage. I really recommend it. It shows how many gay men, propelled by these dynamics for years, sometimes find themselves in middle age at the top of their field and yet deeply depressed or overworked. They realize that rage – even constructive, efficient, effective rage – is no substitute for love.

My fundamental hope in helping to make marriage equality a possibility is that young gay boys and girls, as I once was, can now see a future filled with love rather than rage, intimacy rather than “achievement”.