Judgment Not Included
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
AS police investigators peel away the layers of the Boston Marathon bombing, there are two aspects of this unfolding story to which I want to react: the mind-set of the alleged bombers and the role of the Internet in shaping it. Important news about both was contained in a single Washington Post article on Tuesday.
“The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews,” The Post reported. The officials said, “Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev … do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were ‘self-radicalized’ through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan.”
This is a popular meme among radical Muslim groups, and, to be sure, some Muslim youths were deeply angered by the U.S. interventions in the Middle East. The brothers Tsarnaev may have been among them.
But what in God’s name does that have to do with planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon and blowing up innocent people? It is amazing to me how we’ve come to accept this non sequitur and how easily we’ve allowed radical Muslim groups and their apologists to get away with it.
Mr. Friedman expects a just response to our unjust foreign policy from the suppressed and forsaken groups who are robbed off their natural resources by our muscle diplomacy and unjustified war. The constant “random” check of US citizens who look different and the undermining of our human rights through triot Act along with our media hypocrisy of labeling an gruesome act by a “Muslim” as terrorism while a similar mindless act (e.g. Newton School) by another equally demented “Christian” as only a crime of a mentally disturb individual; all these events are preventing us to fight the real terrorist while sowing the seed of disgruntle homegrown copycats.
Categories: Islam in the press, Islamists, Terrorism, United States