A reader writes:
The issue with the Tsarnaev burial is not whether he should be buried, but whether he should be buried in the community he terrorized. Yvonne Abraham conveniently leaves this out of her predictable screed. I agree that local leaders should have done a better job of locating a burial site outside the metropolitan area, but this is also relatively uncharted waters if I’m not mistaken – burying a domestic terrorist (we never classified Lanza as such) in the weeks following the attack.
The mayors of Cambridge and Boston are absolutely correct in acknowledging that a burial site located within their respective city limits would become a significant distraction and public safety/health issue. Buying Tsarnaev locally would undoubtedly lead to the resting site becoming public. What then? An armed guard patrolling a 50-square foot area from now until forever?
Another:
I want to offer one instructive historical example for burying terrorists. In the fall of 1977, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe all committed suicide (though this fact is self is still highly debated) in Stuttgart’s Stammhein Prison.
At the time these were the most notorious terrorists in the world have killed or maimed dozens of Americans and German in their effort to bring about Revolution. Far from being like the Tsarnaev brothers, these folks were more akin to Osama bin Laden in the German public’s mind.
So when they died, all the surrounding cities scrambled to tell the media that there was no way that the terrorists would be buried in their city, in their cemetery. Finally, the mayor of Stuttgart stepped in. A great man (and the son of an even greater man), Manfred Rommel said “Enough! In death all enmity must cease.” And he ordered them buried in a Stuttgart public cemetery.
If you go to New York’s Museum of Modern Art you can see Gerhard Richter’s massive painting depicting their funeral (see above). The gravesite did become a bit of a shrine at first, but that went away. I visited it 10 years ago and no one else was around and it clearly hadn’t been visited much that day at least. Just a quiet little gravesite in the corner of a giant cemetery.
The Dish 