Month: April 2013

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?

This quote from the user of the YouTube account called Tamerlan Tsarnaev seems important to me:

You are not a grand Michael but the same Misha that you were before Islam. You accepted Shiism not because it convinces you, but because of the fears, and interests (about which Allah knows) which you’ve followed. Just like you entered into Islam, so to you flew out of it. You betrayed yourself, Misha. Well anyways…farewell.

This is the mark of fundamentalist religious fanaticism. Notice the total abandonment to God and the contempt for the moderate forms of religion. Serwer homes in here:

The YouTube page includes religious videos, including one of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter. One playlist includes a video dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, which is embraced by Islamic extremists—particularly Al Qaeda. The prophecy states that an invincible army will come from the region of Khurasan in central Asia.

“This is a major hadith (reported saying of the prophet Muhammad) that jihadis use, it is essentially an end-time prophecy,” says Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy “This is definitely important in Al Qaeda’s ideology.” In The Black Banners, the book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan that is named after this prophecy, Soufan describes the prophecy this way:

Khurasan is a term for a historical region spanning northeastern and eastern Iran and parts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan. Because of the hadith, jihadists believe that this is the region from which they will inflict a major defeat against their enemies—in the Islamic version of Armageddon.

In many ways, this is enough to explain a huge amount. Why does someone do something like hold up a 7-11? What’s the point of all this? America has not occupied Chechnya. Chechnyan terrorists have targeted Russia in the past almost exclusively. The point of this is that you can be liberated into violence by the Apocalypse.

A little lost in modernity; finding meaning in the most extreme forms of religion; in many ways assimilated by the West but finding new ways to feel deeply, internally alienated by it: this is a classic profile of an Internet Jihadist. And there is nothing traditional about this religion. It’s hyper-modern, spread online and combustible with any other personal dramas.

And if you think you are enacting God’s will at the end of the world, why not go out with guns and bombs blazing?

Ryan Chittum applauds the MSM:

From everything I saw all night from the West Coast, the press performed admirably. The Boston Globe had reporters on the scene and set up a liveblog to collect their tweets and pictures. It scooped that the suspects being pursued were indeed the marathon bombing suspects. The local TV news that I watched was measured and responsible, but broke news. WHDH was first to report, well before anyone else, that one of the suspects was dead.

… And then there were the keyboard crimefighters at Reddit. At one point a police dispatcher, apparently incorrectly, said that the suspects’ names were Sunil Tripathi, a Brown student who disappeared last month, and Mike Mulugeta. Reddit, still smarting from the backlash to their amateur sleuthing, took a very premature victory lap.

Matthew Ingram argues that, despite some missteps, “having more sources is ultimately better”:

Yes, users of Reddit made mistakes — plenty of them, including identifying the wrong person as a suspect a second time on Thursday after erroneous information emerged from police scanners and other sources. But CNN and the NY Post have made plenty of mistakes as well, something Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review doesn’t really mention in his post about how brilliant the traditional media was and how wrong Reddit has been. The larger point is that this isn’t an either/or situation — crowdsourcing is valuable, and has been valuable for journalism and will continue to be.

We’re getting warmer. The YouTube page reveals the deep religious affiliation of a man called Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Max Fisher:

One of the “favorite” videos lists “7 steps to a successful prayer.” Another denounces Sufism, a more mystical branch of Islam. Another, with the title “one of the signs of Allah,” shows a chameleon changing colors at will as a man sings Arabic prayers in the background.

Several of the videos under “Islam” are by a man named Abdülhamid Al Juhani, who is listed by a Salafist Web portal as a scholar. His videos include Arabic audio and Russian text and show photos of Grozny, the Chechen capital. Another video under the “Islam” heading shows young men carrying assault rifles through a forest as a narrator intones, “They demonize as terrorists anyone who supports Islam.”

Update: Mother Jones’s Adam Serwer also looks at the YouTube page. He says it includes “a video of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter” as well as a video “dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, which is embraced by Islamic extremists — particularly Al Qaeda.”

The fact that they are brothers also suggests to me that this could well be just the two of them, with the younger brother controlled by the older one. But where did they get guns capable of holding off the police last night? Their uncle is emphatically horrified by what happened. But he hasn’t seen them since 2006. He’s accusing them simply of being “losers” and that religion has nothing to do with it. “We’re ashamed” he says passionately. I believe him.

I never would have thought that someone that smoked as much weed as Jahar would be on the News for terrorism.

— mac (@ChinksMcGee) April 19, 2013

What’s really striking to me as a psychological matter is how mellow and sweet Djohar Tsarnaev seemed to his friends. What’s also striking is how both assimilated and yet not assimilated both brothers appear. Their peers are expressing utter disbelief. From one of the captions on Tamerlan’s boxing photo-essay:

Tamerlan says he doesn’t drink or smoke anymore: “God said no alcohol.” A muslim, he says: “There are no values anymore,” and worries that “people can’t control themselves.”

Tamerlan says he doesn’t usually take his shirt off so girls don’t get bad ideas: “I’m very religious.”

Tamerlan says he loves the movie “Borat,” even though some of the jokes are a bit too much.

If he wins enough fights there, Tamerlan says he could be selected for the US Olympic team and be naturalized American. Unless his native Chechnya becomes independent, Tamerlan says he would rather compete for the United States than for Russia.

The only suggestion that this is connected to international terrorism is from the shooting and explosive tactics used by the Tsarnaev brothers last night. That may have required some kind of training. But the testimonies from those who knew Djohar – including credible sources like a former teacher-friend of his – suggest nothing of the kind. “There is no way in the world …” is the general reaction. “Nothing in his behavior or comportment; he was a great athlete, a great sportsman … a typical kid.” A former teacher: “This is beyond unbelievable.”

But notice the sexual prudery that is sometimes found among Jihadists: “There are no values anymore” … “People can’t control themselves.” And the Amazon wish-list suggests a very careful and radicalized mindset. But it also feels geeky and loner-y and webby to me. You don’t need formal training to become a Jihadist. You just need the Internet.

This is a reminder that we live in a new world: where the Internet can give people ideas, can turn mellow stoners into paranoid mass-murderers. And a reminder that we live in the same world. You never truly know what’s going on inside the minds of others.