The Boston bomber chase
Anyone who’s been watching the news knows what’s been going down in Boston. I was up till very late trying to absorb it all, hoping against hope that bomber #2 would be caught. So far, nothing doing on that.
Boston is reeling, of course. Other cities may be familiar with enormous shootouts and SWAT teams, but Boston really is a relatively sleepy city, and aims to keep it that way.
Watching the news, I haven’t seen anyone yet mention what almost everyone in Boston knows, which is that Watertown is something like Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn (if you’re familiar with that area)—that is, the place to go for Middle Eastern food, with a relatively heavy population of Middle Eastern origin. That may be irrelevant to this story, because most people there are not Middle Eastern, the bombers themselves are Muslims of Chechnyan ethnic origin (nearby, but not really Middle Eastern), and the presence of the shootout there may have been a pure coincidence anyway.
Chechnya, by the way, is in a part of the former Soviet Union that’s not too far from Georgia and Armenia, and then Iran to the south of that. Anyone who’s followed the news of the last decade knows that it was Chechnyan separatist terrorists who perpetrated the Beslan massacre, a particularly heinous attack that heavily involved children.
Whether or not these two brothers have Chechnyan concerns as a motive is unknown, however, as are a great many other things about them. The one who’s been killed, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was an athlete and amateur boxer of no small skill. They came to this country as youngish boys in 2002 with their parents, so it’s hard to believe they were sleeper agents unless it was the family who were the agents and who trained them in some way (the parents are reportedly back in Russia).
They are Muslims. Is this a surprise? If so, it shouldn’t be, despite the left’s deep and ardent desire for the truth to be otherwise, and despite the fact that the left will no doubt do some heavy tap-dancing to either disguise the fact of their religious beliefs, or minimize it, or blame their radicalization on the right and/or America anyway.
My guess is that as the facts emerge, the brothers’ motives will turn out to be a toxic mix of the political, the religious, and the personal and pathological. Whether or not they are freelancers or in league with some organization remains to be seen. My hunch is some form of the latter, although perhaps not officially al Qaeda. The fact that they are a pair, and brothers, puts them in the camp (in psychological terms, that is) of so many famous crime duos in which the twosome is more than the sum of its parts, and each member acts synergistically on the other.
[NOTE: I have a very busy day today and evening and won’t be able to update as regularly as I otherwise would. So it’s up to you!]
ADDENDUM: Here’s a piece about what friends and classmates of Dzokhar (“Jahar”) Tsarnaev have to say about him. No one saw this coming; he is uniformly described as a nice and friendly guy, and since he’s only 19 now these people knew him up until quite recently. Here are some interesting reactions:
“I saw the pictures last night and thought it looked kind of like him,” said Rebecca Mazur, who was in Tsarnaev’s class at school and is now studying at Harvard. “But I felt mean even thinking that the person in the photos looked like him.”…
“I went on Facebook and so far have been reading Facebook status after Facebook status of people who are feeling shocked and betrayed,” Mazur said.
“I didn’t know Jahar extremely well, but he was literally among the sweetest, most laid-back guys I’ve ever known,” said another student at Harvard who went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Always friendly and welcoming, I always felt comfortable hanging out with him.”
Tsarnaev seemed even-keeled up until recently, the student said.
“In fact, as recently as November, I played pick-up basketball with him and he seemed like he was doing great at UMASS Dartmouth,” the student said. “I don’t know what changed since then, but evidently it was something pretty big.”
There’s really too much news to cover adequately here, but if you go to memeorandum you’ll find links to a great many articles and reactions to those articles.
Not sure how nearby you are. Stay safe.
KLSmith: well, I have business that takes me to Boston today.
Thanks.
The 7-year age difference between the brothers is probably significant in how well assimilated they became. The younger brother was under 10 when he arrived, but the older one was in his teens and probably felt more of a stranger. He was also of an age were the macho aspects of his native culture would assert themselves. He may well have pulled his younger brother into this because of family loyalty.
The Left has indeed started their tap-dancing.
Their “father” is back in the former Soviet Union somewhere; I did not note exactly where, and I don’t care. The point is that he is not here.
These guys were taken into highlevel US facilities, including the Boston ‘Rindge’ and Latin School (formerly the elite Boston Latin School). They were denied no opportunity, it seems. The US tried to assimilate them, but they would not assimilate with the USA. Assimilation, it must be said, has not worked; Diversity drives us, from our immigration policy on up. And we are all the losers.
Despite the media spin, they were loners who did not assimilate. So, Blooey, we pay, for our refusal to set even entrance Standards. The Pres. of Chechnya is now on record as blaming us for our failures toward the perpetrators.
Insanity.
Neo says “Other cities may be familiar with enormous shootouts and SWAT teams, but Boston really is a relatively sleepy city”
Nope. This is unprecedented.
Figure the massive economic costs of this large-area shutdown. Not the direct costs of the cops, but the indirect, lost productivety, costs.
The MSM has only scratched the surface on the lives of these brothers. School and athletics are just the surface, and comments from acquaintances are not that helpful. It will be interesting to see how much they uncover and actually report, such as who raised them, who their close friends are, where they spent their spare time, etc. Their social media accounts, such as YouTube and Facebook. seem to provide a much more detailed view of who these terrorists are/were.
Don Carlos: I was thinking of events like this in LA, for example.
Of course, it is not the same. But Boston hasn’t even experienced that level of violence. And now this.
Don Carlos: It was Cambridge Rindge and Latin, not Boston, and it’s a regular high school.
I was reading the Via Media post on this and one of the commenters mentioned John Updike’s book Terrorist. As I checked it out at Amazon, I realized that Obama had gone through some of the same things as Updike’s main character: namely disrupted family, idealized missing father, mentor(s) that provide an ideological base as a substitute for more normal family ties. I’m not saying that Obama is equal to a terrorist, but I do think that these factors could play a role in how the Boston bombers were formed.
Aha. So not the Boston Latin pvt. I wondered at the name, since my mom used to live in Rindge, NH.
expat: the trouble is that Updike’s was fiction. I am wary of drawing large conclusions from fiction, no matter how well-researched. The truths you cite, e.g. disrupted family, are hardly revelatory and were well-known to Updike, who, if truth be told, is not one of my favorites.
Don Carlos,
Since I haven’t read Terrorist, I wasn’t trying to make too much of Updike’s plot. It simply made me think of all the discussions going on today about boys needing a father in the home as a role model and how this is probably more true of boys in the middle of 2 cultures. I also think it is very important for the family to allow the kids to integrate into the new culture, which doesn’t mean that have to give up all of the parents’ culture. The boy who is made to feel like a failure in both worlds is more likely to need to prove himself.
In some ways, many blacks are in the same situation because they are accused of acting white or selling out if they do well in school. But if they don’t learn they are doomed to a crappy life.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev had a first name associated with Tamerlane, a use of terror.
Interesting history for that name.
Attila is a first name found in Hungary and in Turkey.
expat: “The boy who is made to feel like a failure in both worlds is more likely to need to prove himself.”
An interesting thought/observation. Does that imply that blacks who attempt to shift whiteward are dissed by blacks, rejected by whites since they are black and ?suspect, will be more driven to ‘prove themselves’? In good ways, or bad? Which?
Well, I think the gangs keep a pretty tight hold over their neighborhoods. And I’ve read that boys who do OK in school up to a certain age stop trying when they hit middle and high school. The group seems to fill in to provide a self image when the family has failed to do so. It’s a circular thing. The race baiters and gang members tell him the cards are stacked against him.
I think that some boys who are caught between two worlds with rigid families tucked away in a different culture might turn to something they see a macho. I remember a report (I believe in the NYT magazine) about a young Morocan who joined AQ in Afghanistan. He had had a girlfriend who was not approved by the family. They wanted him to marry a cousin. So he joined the jihad to escape.
Some of these tribal societies don’t treat their kids as individuals, but as property. A turkish-born German sociologist reported on her studies of Turks in German youth incarceration centers. She asked one boy how it was being there, and he responded, “Not too bad. It’s the first time anyone has ever paid any attention to me.”
Here is an interesting report from Fox:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/19/prof-says-boston-bombing-suspect-sought-help-rediscovering-chechen-roots/
Like Don Carlos I have wondered at the total cost of all of this. The loss of talent and productivity of those who died. The cost of time and rehabilitation to those seriously injured. The medical cost for all of the direct victims and their families. The cost for increased police protection by first responders at Boston and around the nation. The loss of events to avoid a repeat. The cost to local businesses by closing or reduced clientele.
Less quantifiable but no less important is the loss of will and increased divisiveness across the nation. We already are being subjected to the song of the apologist on the left.
Muslim immigrants are just plain bad economics, bad politics and by persisting in this bent the multicultural crowd is accelerating an all out religious war that will entirely eclipse all world wars combined.
The road to war is paved with optimism.
He’s in custody at this time.
Whew.
Here is VDH’s take on the background reasons:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/346141/islamist-pull
So I have 3 choices of who is warring on the US at this moment.
1. Muslims who hate the US.
2. Leftists that hate the US.
3. Right wing militias that are behind the assassinations and bombings in the US.
Which one should I pick?
So do links from Facebook activity now contribute as search engine optimisation?
I heard they help after the Penguin algorithm update
You are now part of my weekly website list, keep up the interesting work!