Now that the two (main at least) terrorists from
the Boston Marathon attack have been killed or captured we enter a new
phase, the phase in which the dominant Politically Correct (but
Factually Incorrect) forces try to explain away the
attack.
Can this be done? Will they really try? Well,
yes. True, as one of my correspondents remarked it is much easier to
obfuscate far distant Benghazi than the total shutdown and horror in the
middle of a major American city. Yet the spin-masters
are already at work.
The first step must be, in part, a stalling
technique but it sets the pattern for what is to come. As, in the words
of a Reuters story, the “Boston Marathon bombing investigation turns to
motive,” the motive must be obfuscated.
The Reuters piece is a good start. The article
spends seven paragraphs discussing the parents claim that the two
brothers were framed. This suggests that the mass media and politicians
will not shrink from suggesting—perhaps I should
say, gives fair hearing—to bizarre conspiracy theories and doubts.
People shouldn’t believe these completely, is the theme, but you just
can’t be too sure that two young Muslims would have any reason to harm
Americans.
Indeed, there are now witnesses who heard the
two terrorists’ mother claiming that September 11 was a U.S. plot to
make people hate Muslims. That's where playing with that kind of fire
leads.
In the article, the word "Islam" is not
mentioned, except to say that they once lived in one predominantly
Muslim country and another place they lived, Dagestan, is "a southern
Russian province that lies at the heart of a violent Islamist
insurgency." Here, we have another technique, minimize Islam as a factor
and turn it into background noise.
Obviously, this will not apply completely both
because the elephant in the room is too big and there is still some
journalistic integrity in places. Both the Washington Post and Mother
Jones took a lead in exposing the You-Tube likes
of one of the terrorists which showed a propensity for al-Qaida views to
say the least.
There are a lot of other quivers, however, in the arsenal of denial.
On “Face the Nation” Massachusetts Governor
Deval Patrick said that he had no idea why the Tsarnaev brothers would
target "innocent men, women and children in the way that these two
fellows did." The answer, of course, is that these
people were not regarded as innocent at all but as soldiers in the
alleged Christian-Jewish war on Islam, precisely the same thinking that
has been produced by Islamists for decades. Might September 11, 2001, be
a clue here?
Of course, for Patrick to say that at this point
in the investigation is understandable on one level, a refusal by a
government official to remark on an ongoing investigation and a relief
from “the police are stupid” or “Trayvon looks
like the son I didn’t have” remarks by someone else. Yet what is this
claim is sustained week after week until the heat is off?
NBC News has just reported that Tamerlan
Tsarnaev had visited an Islamist radical six times in a mosque in
Dagestan. The Caucasian/Chechen angle, however, does offer some hope. A
lot of media time can be spent talking about that conflict.
Of course, if the young men were acting as Chechens they would have
attacked a Russian and not an American target. The United States has
not, even by the usual stretch of radical Islamist imagination, had
anything to do with the conflict in Chechnya.
The more compelling the conflict there is as a
source of pain and passion, the less compelling the argument that that
was a motive. The Russians have indeed been brutal in suppressing the
rebellion, far more than the West or Israel has
acted toward anyone. So what cause overrides that one? Yet Chechen
grievances will be a good source of obfuscation.
Then there will a frantic search for the “blame
ourselves” theme. If the issue wasn’t such a tragic one, this would be
humorous. Could America have acted more kindly toward these two
brothers? Don’t underestimate how well this theme
will play with those citizens who drink other flavors of Kool-Aid.
In this pursuit no idiocy is unthinkable.
Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, who is trying to be an
Obama clone, explained:
“There is no question that this happened because
of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely
at war…with society.”
The solution, then, is not to “marginalize
people even further who already feel like they are enemies of society
rather than people who have hope for the future.”
In other words, doing anything is more dangerous
than doing nothing. To combat radical Islam is to hurt people’s
feelings and that will produce more terrorism.
They were allowed in (rather questionably) as
permanent residents and suddenly large numbers of relatives were in the
United States as well (so much for draconian immigration laws); one of
the brothers became a citizen. They went to
the best schools. What did they learn there about the greatness of
America? Was the seed of rage fertilized by the demonization of American
history as evil, greedy, racist, and imperialist? One of them even got a
scholarship.
It is vital to understand the profound
difference between these two and the September 11 hijackers, men who
came on a mission of sabotage and murder. They reached the U.S. shore as
enemies, reliable agents of revolutionary retribution.
These two young men, however, had a free choice.
They had to actively close their minds to everything good they
experienced and to adopt an ideology of hate. Only a very powerful force
could move them in that direction. We have seen
this frequently in the United Kingdom and France.
Guess what? If such comparisons were to be made
it would have to be acknowledged that there is a second-generation
(though strictly speaking these two were first generation) time bomb
implanted. That means one can expect many more attacks
like this. But will anyone make that point?
There normality will be used to make them
seem…normal, their motive inexplicable. But on the contrary it is their
very apparent normality, their seeming assimilation into American life,
which makes the situation so scary.
What about their mosque and other contacts in
the Muslim community? Why didn’t they get an anti-extremist
indoctrination there, an explanation of what Islam really is about? They
attended a Muslim Brotherhood sponsored mosque (but that
won’t be said) and the Boston Muslim religious leadership is full of
extremists (the evidence of which has long been available). The mosque
even received a subsidy from Boston even as it hosted anti-American
speakers who made the precise arguments used to rationalize
terrorism.
We won’t be hearing much about these issues
though. Well, except for two aspects: the story is now circulating that
one of the brothers was thrown out of his mosque for being too radical.
Then, there are all the denunciations of the
terror attack by Islamist front groups.
Having followed this issue for many years, I
have never heard of a single anti-radicalization program conducted by
any mosque or “mainstream” Islamic group. Real moderates are isolated,
vilified, denied media attention, and even forced
out of local mosques. In a 2011 Pew poll, fully half of American Muslims
say their leaders aren’t doing enough to fight extremism. That last
point can safely be used as a certified non-“Islamophobic” argument
about where much of the problem lies. But it won’t
be.
And of course there is the troubled youth angle
to be played to the fullest. Yes, the tribulations of young adulthood
and adolescence are factors. But only inasmuch as it makes them
vulnerable to systematic indoctrination. In other words,
their specific psychology and even personal experiences are not the
motive any more than the childhood of a professional hit-man for the
Mafia is.
Another angle will be the growing story of
governmental incompetence in using intelligence to stop terrorists. In
part, this is unfair since there have also been many successes. A more
important issue is why government officials, politicians,
army officers, academics, and journalists fear to point out the truth.
Look at the Nidal Hassan/Fort Hood case. Doing so is bad for their
careers and reputation, as well as being sometimes counter to their
ideology.
Then there is the partisan argument, as made
most memorably by a journalist who openly hoped the terrorists would be
white right-wingers. There is an unnoticed dimension here. If the attack
is seen as a political defeat it cannot be
a learning experience. The question isn’t, Does this attack tell us
something important about the real world, but: How can we explain it
away so we don’t suffer losses in the effort to fundamentally transform
America into a just, non-racist society?
And so it can be claimed that, in a sense, white
right-wingers, or at least the kind of policies they would endorse, did
cause the Boston attack. America was mean to these kids; it is
aggressive in other countries, counter-terrorist
protection was reduced by budget cuts.
In other words, lying, concealing, and
misleading become defined as virtuous. As Trudeau said, talking honestly
about revolutionary Islamism would be to inspire more racism and
terrorism.
Finally, there is a “full admission” fallback
argument on which U.S. foreign policy is based. Sure it was those evil
SOBs at al-Qaida. That’s why other Islamists are relatively good. That’s
why we have to promote them into power since
only they can counter the “bad” Islamists. That’s why Islamist
governments in Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, and
Turkey are good for you.
Indeed, Secretary of State John Kerry in Turkey
compared Americans’ feelings about the Boston attack to Turkish feelings
about the killing of jihadis engaged in supporting a terrorist group
(Hamas) who attacked Israeli soldiers during
the Gaza flotilla incident. This should not be seen merely as a clumsy
statement but as dangerous and revealing stupidity.
It is dangerous because it tells Muslims that
they are equally the victims of “our” terrorism; and it is revealing
because the context shows the equation of all violence, no matter what
the cause, that reinforces such thinking. A U.S.
attack on terrorists in Yemen, Afghanistan, or elsewhere then becomes
anti-Muslim violence that justifies the next terror attack in an
American city.
Former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw explained that
American drones were killing innocent people and this led to rage
against the “presumptuousness of the United States.”
In an honest discussion it must be considered
what U.S. policy factors lead to terrorism. But now there is the
transfer to America of the old “cycle of violence” argument about the
Middle East. Terrorists murder Israeli civilians or
fire rockets at Israel; Israel defends itself and the two events are
treated as indistinguishable.
Defending yourself offends people.
The proper response is to denounce the
terrorists, the ideology of terrorism, and the right of focused
self-defense, which means doing everything possible to retaliate against
those responsible and not citizens of another country chosen
at random.
The American secretary of state, a leading
Canadian politician, journalists, and others are thus rationalizing in
advance more such attacks. They will get their “wish” and then explain
away the next event as more proof for their worldview.
This article is published on PJMedia.
Please be subscriber 31,388 (among more than 50,000 total readers). Put email address in upper right-hand box: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com
We’d love to have your support and work hard to earn it. See our new feature with 13 free books at http://www.gloria-center.org.
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Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Fl., NY, NY 10003.
For tax-deductible donations in Canada and the UK, write us here.
--------------------
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research
in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East
Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His next book, Nazis,
Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle
East, written with Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, will be published by Yale
University Press in January 2014. His latest book is Israel: An
Introduction, also published by Yale. Thirteen of his books can be read
and downloaded for free at the website of the GLORIA
Center including The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict, The Long
War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East and
The Truth About Syria. His blog is Rubin Reports. His original articles
are published at PJMedia.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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To: grw-list@googlegroups.com
Everybody everywhere should read this.
To: grw-list@googlegroups.com
The "Mysterious Motive" Cover-Up on the Boston Attack Begins
By Barry Rubin
Now
that the two (main at least) terrorists from the Boston Marathon attack
have been killed or captured we enter a new phase, the phase in which
the dominant Politically Correct (but Factually Incorrect) forces try to
explain away the attack.
Can
this be done? Will they really try? Well, yes. True, as one of my
correspondents remarked it is much easier to obfuscate far distant
Benghazi than the total shutdown and horror in the middle of a major
American city. Yet the
spin-masters are already at work.
The
first step must be, in part, a stalling technique but it sets the
pattern for what is to come. As, in the words of a Reuters story, the
“Boston Marathon bombing investigation turns to motive,” the motive must
be obfuscated.
The Reuters
piece is a good start. The article spends seven paragraphs discussing
the parents claim that the two brothers were framed. This suggests that
the mass media and politicians will not shrink from suggesting—perhaps I
should say, gives fair hearing—to bizarre conspiracy theories and
doubts. People shouldn’t believe these completely, is the theme, but you
just can’t be too sure that two young Muslims would have any reason to
harm Americans.
Indeed,
there are now witnesses who heard the two terrorists’ mother claiming
that September 11 was a U.S. plot to make people hate Muslims. That's
where playing with that kind of fire leads.
In
the article, the word "Islam" is not mentioned, except to say that they
once lived in one predominantly Muslim country and another place they
lived, Dagestan, is "a southern Russian province that lies at the heart
of a violent Islamist insurgency." Here, we have another technique,
minimize Islam as a factor and turn it into background noise.
Obviously,
this will not apply completely both because the elephant in the room is
too big and there is still some journalistic integrity in places. Both
the Washington Post and Mother Jones took a lead in exposing the
You-Tube
likes of one of the terrorists which showed a propensity for al-Qaida
views to say the least.
There are a lot of other quivers, however, in the arsenal of denial.
On
“Face the Nation” Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said that he had
no idea why the Tsarnaev brothers would target "innocent men, women and
children in the way that these two fellows did." The answer, of course,
is that these people were not regarded as innocent at all but as
soldiers in the alleged Christian-Jewish war on Islam, precisely the
same thinking that has been produced by Islamists for decades. Might
September 11, 2001, be a clue here?
Of
course, for Patrick to say that at this point in the
investigation is understandable on one level, a refusal by a government
official to remark on an ongoing investigation and a relief from “the
police are stupid” or “Trayvon looks like the son I didn’t have” remarks
by someone else. Yet what is this claim is sustained week after week
until the heat is off?
NBC
News has just reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had visited an Islamist
radical six times in a mosque in Dagestan. The Caucasian/Chechen angle,
however, does offer some hope. A lot of media time can be spent talking
about that conflict. Of course, if the young men were acting as Chechens
they would have attacked a Russian and not an American target. The
United States has not, even by the usual stretch of radical Islamist
imagination, had anything to do with the conflict in Chechnya.
The
more compelling the conflict there is as a source of pain and passion,
the less compelling the argument that that was a motive. The Russians
have indeed been brutal in suppressing the rebellion, far more than the
West or Israel has acted toward anyone. So what cause overrides that
one? Yet Chechen grievances will be a good source of obfuscation.
Then
there will a frantic search for the “blame ourselves” theme. If the
issue wasn’t such a tragic one, this would be humorous. Could America
have acted more kindly toward these two brothers? Don’t underestimate
how well this theme will play with those citizens who drink other
flavors of Kool-Aid.
In this pursuit no idiocy is unthinkable. Canadian Liberal
Party leader Justin Trudeau, who is trying to be an Obama clone, explained:
“There
is no question that this happened because of someone who feels
completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war…with society.”
The
solution, then, is not to “marginalize people even further who already
feel like they are enemies of society rather than people who have hope
for the future.”
In
other words, doing anything is more dangerous than doing nothing. To
combat radical Islam is to hurt people’s feelings and that will produce
more terrorism.
They
were allowed in (rather
questionably) as permanent residents and suddenly large numbers of
relatives were in the United States as well (so much for draconian
immigration laws); one of the brothers became a citizen. They went to
the best schools. What did they learn there about the greatness of
America? Was the seed of rage fertilized by the demonization of American
history as evil, greedy, racist, and imperialist? One of them even got a
scholarship.
It is vital
to understand the profound difference between these two and the
September 11 hijackers, men who came on a mission of sabotage and
murder. They reached the U.S. shore as enemies, reliable agents of
revolutionary retribution.
These
two young men, however, had a free choice. They had to actively close
their minds to everything good they experienced and to adopt an ideology
of hate.
Only a very powerful force could move them in that direction. We have
seen this frequently in the United Kingdom and France.
Guess
what? If such comparisons were to be made it would have to be
acknowledged that there is a second-generation (though strictly speaking
these two were first generation) time bomb implanted. That means one
can expect many more attacks like this. But will anyone make that point?
There
normality will be used to make them seem…normal, their motive
inexplicable. But on the contrary it is their very apparent normality,
their seeming assimilation into American life, which makes the situation
so scary.
What
about their mosque and other contacts in the
Muslim community? Why didn’t they get an anti-extremist indoctrination
there, an explanation of what Islam really is about? They attended a
Muslim Brotherhood sponsored mosque (but that won’t be said) and the
Boston Muslim religious leadership is full of extremists (the evidence
of which has long been available). The mosque even received a subsidy
from Boston even as it hosted anti-American speakers who made the
precise arguments used to rationalize terrorism.
We
won’t be hearing much about these issues though. Well, except for two
aspects: the story is now circulating that one of the brothers was
thrown out of his mosque for being too radical. Then, there are all the
denunciations of the terror attack by Islamist front groups.
Having
followed this issue
for many years, I have never heard of a single anti-radicalization
program conducted by any mosque or “mainstream” Islamic group. Real
moderates are isolated, vilified, denied media attention, and even
forced out of local mosques. In a 2011 Pew poll, fully half of American
Muslims say their leaders aren’t doing enough to fight extremism. That
last point can safely be used as a certified non-“Islamophobic” argument
about where much of the problem lies. But it won’t be.
And
of course there is the troubled youth angle to be played to the
fullest. Yes, the tribulations of young adulthood and adolescence are
factors. But only inasmuch as it makes them vulnerable to systematic
indoctrination. In other words, their specific psychology and even
personal experiences are not the motive any more than the childhood of a
professional hit-man for the Mafia
is.
Another
angle will be the growing story of governmental incompetence in using
intelligence to stop terrorists. In part, this is unfair since there
have also been many successes. A more important issue is why government
officials, politicians, army officers, academics, and journalists fear
to point out the truth. Look at the Nidal Hassan/Fort Hood case. Doing
so is bad for their careers and reputation, as well as being sometimes
counter to their ideology.
Then
there is the partisan argument, as made most memorably by a journalist
who openly hoped the terrorists would be white right-wingers. There is
an unnoticed dimension here. If the attack is seen as a political defeat
it cannot be a learning experience. The question isn’t, Does this
attack tell us something
important about the real world, but: How can we explain it away so we
don’t suffer losses in the effort to fundamentally transform America
into a just, non-racist society?
And
so it can be claimed that, in a sense, white right-wingers, or at least
the kind of policies they would endorse, did cause the Boston attack.
America was mean to these kids; it is aggressive in other countries,
counter-terrorist protection was reduced by budget cuts.
In
other words, lying, concealing, and misleading become defined as
virtuous. As Trudeau said, talking honestly about revolutionary Islamism
would be to inspire more racism and terrorism.
Finally,
there is a “full admission”
fallback argument on which U.S. foreign policy is based. Sure it was
those evil SOBs at al-Qaida. That’s why other Islamists are relatively
good. That’s why we have to promote them into power since only they can
counter the “bad” Islamists. That’s why Islamist governments in Egypt,
the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey are good for you.
Indeed,
Secretary of State John Kerry in Turkey compared Americans’ feelings
about the Boston attack to Turkish feelings about the killing of jihadis
engaged in supporting a terrorist group (Hamas) who attacked Israeli
soldiers during the Gaza flotilla incident. This should not be seen
merely as a clumsy statement but as dangerous and revealing stupidity.
It
is dangerous because it tells Muslims that they are
equally the victims of “our” terrorism; and it is revealing because the
context shows the equation of all violence, no matter what the cause,
that reinforces such thinking. A U.S. attack on terrorists in Yemen,
Afghanistan, or elsewhere then becomes anti-Muslim violence that
justifies the next terror attack in an American city.
Former
NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw explained that American drones were killing
innocent people and this led to rage against the “presumptuousness of
the United States.”
In
an honest discussion it must be considered what U.S. policy factors
lead to terrorism. But now there is the transfer to America of the old
“cycle of violence” argument about the Middle East. Terrorists murder
Israeli civilians or fire rockets at Israel; Israel
defends itself and the two events are treated as indistinguishable.
Defending yourself offends people.
The
proper response is to denounce the terrorists, the ideology of
terrorism, and the right of focused self-defense, which means doing
everything possible to retaliate against those responsible and not
citizens of another country chosen at random.
The
American secretary of state, a leading Canadian politician,
journalists, and others are thus rationalizing in advance more such
attacks. They will get their “wish” and then explain away the next event
as more proof for their worldview.
This article is published on
PJMedia.
Please
be subscriber 31,388 (among more than 50,000 total readers). Put email
address in upper right-hand box: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com
We’d
love to have your support and work hard to earn it. See our new feature
with 13 free books at http://www.gloria-center.org. Why not make a
tax-deductible donation to the GLORIA Center by PayPal: click here.
By
credit card: click here. Checks: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA
Center” on memo line and send to: American Friends of IDC, 116 East
16th St., 11th Fl., NY, NY 10003.
For tax-deductible
donations in Canada and the UK, write us here.
--------------------
Barry
Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs
(GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International
Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His next book, Nazis, Islamists and the Making
of the Modern Middle East, written with Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, will be
published by Yale University Press in January 2014. His latest book is
Israel: An Introduction, also published by Yale. Thirteen of his books
can be read and downloaded for free at the website of the GLORIA Center
including The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict, The Long War for
Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East and The
Truth About Syria. His blog is Rubin Reports. His original articles are
published at PJMedia.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/ He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/. Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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