Sultan Knish
The murderer is the new celebrity. He emerges out of nowhere with a rags
to mass murder story, and is swiftly accorded all the trappings of
fame. Reporters track down anyone who knew him to learn about his
childhood and his main influences. Relatives and friends both contribute
fuzzy anecdotes, mostly indistinguishable from the ones they would
present if he were competing on American Idol or running for president.
The
disaffected form fan clubs around him. The experts discuss what his
rise to fame means. Books are written about him and then perhaps a
movie. And then it ends and begins all over again.
The Tsernaev brothers, the living one and the dead one, are already
receiving that treatment. Like most murderers they have already become
more famous than their victims. More famous than the rescuers. The
original Tamerlane is better known than any of his countless victims.
The new one is already eclipsing his victims. Before long one of those
Chechen bards whose videos he tagged into his playlist on YouTube will
write a ballad about the Boston massacre and the circle will be
complete.
That ballad, murderous and vile, will still be more honest than most of
the media coverage about the two Chechen Muslims has been. The media's
coverage is weighed down by its old fetish of murder as celebrity. The
media covers murderers and celebrities in the same way. It writes
exhaustively about them, but rarely meaningfully. The murderer, like the
celebrity, is famous for being famous. And fame clips context and
suppresses meaning. It becomes its own reference. A thing is famous for
being known. It is known for being famous. It enters the common language
as a reference. A metaphor.
In the case of the Tsernaevs, the surface coverage, the endless rounds
of interviews with friends and relatives, with anyone who ever met them
or retweed them, is mandatory because it avoids the more difficult
question of why they killed.
The better news outlets answer with convenient terms like
"radicalization" or "self-radicalization" and much of the public, primed
to react to meaningless political jargon as if it had meaning, will
think that they understand. A radical, they know, is a bad person,
except for a brief period when surfers and ninja turtles could use it
and still be good people. They don't quite know why that is, but they
also don't know why high debt is good for the economy or why Islam is a
religion of peace.
Radical and extremist are convenient terms for dismissing people and
subjects without discussing them. Mental shortcuts like that can be
convenient. No one really wants to spend every waking moment debating
the people who think that the moon landing was faked or that we are
ruled over by miniature T-Rex's who somehow look just like people. But
when the body count gets high enough, dismissing it as extremism or
radicalism doesn't hold up. The question must be discussed.
The experts point to foreign policy, but Muslim violence began a
thousand years before the United States existed as an independent
political entity. The younger Tsernaev sibling scrawled something about
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, prompted or unprompted, but Iraq is
yesterday's news and America is in Afghanistan because of the Muslim
attacks of September 11. We can keep retracing every event and
connecting it to a prior event, but the constraints of history will
swiftly take us back to before Independence Hall, Columbus and for that
matter the English language.
If we are to flounder looking around for a first cause, we must either
fetch up against the founding of Islam or try to make a case for Islamic
violence predating Islam. Neither is very tenable. Dzhokhar can claim
that he and his brother were defending Islam by murdering an 8-year-old,
Hitler claimed that he was defending Germany by invading Poland and
Japan is still waiting around for South Korea to thank it for protecting
it from Western imperialism.
Prisons are full of 300 pound men who beat their 90 pound wives to death
in self-defense and spree killers who felt bullied and misunderstood
and defended themselves with killing sprees. The kind of evil we see in
movies, the serial killer who gleefully whisper about demonic pacts and
the joy of killing, are a rarity. Even human monsters are human. They
explain things in terms of their egos. They are always defending
themselves against some form of oppression and looking for someone to
sympathize with their outrage.
Muslim terrorists are no different. The Taliban just poisoned a girls
school as part of their campaign to defend Afghanistan from women who
can read and write. Hamas fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli
school bus in defense of Palestine. Tamerlan Tsarnaev put down a bomb
next to an 8-year-old boy in defense of Islam.
Islam, as one of the great world religions, has a long history of
needing to be defended against small boys, blind female poets and
elderly cartoonists. Sometimes Muslims have to defend Islam against each
other, the way they are now doing in Syria. Other times defending Islam
requires demolishing its archeological sites, the way that the Saudis
are doing. Either way defending Islam is difficult work.
Everyone in a war usually claims to be defending against something. But
the younger Tsarnaev was not really angry about Afghanistan or Iraq. He
wasn't defending them. He was defending Islam. If you want to defend
Afghanistan, then all you have to do is board a plane to Pakistan and
then make the right contacts and find your way across the border to join
a band of likeminded fellows fighting to defend your new country from
women who can read. But to defend Islam, you can stay at home in Boston
and kill little boys..
What is this thing called Islam? We can call it a religion, but that
doesn't tell us much. Defining religion is a famously tricky affair. The
bombmaking instructions in Al Qaeda's Inspire magazine begin by telling
the would-be defender of Islam that the key ingredient in building a
pressure cooker bomb, like the one used at the Boston Marathon, is trust
in Allah. There is a kind of faith in that, but it's more like the kind
of prayer you expect to hear Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson utter to a
god that they made in their own murderous image. Serial killers praying
to a patron deity of serial killers to help them murder little boys in
defense of a religion whose faith is in the murder of little boys.
But the whole thing need not be all that mysterious. Western man spent
much of the last century threatening to fight to the death over the
political and economic system that he would live under. Dispense with
the label of religion and the sight of two angry young men setting off
bombs in an American city is not all that alien. Neither is their
motive.
There are two Islams that we can conceive of; the private and the
public. It is it not difficult to see which of these the Tsarnaevs were
defending. Despite the morbid fantasies of the real Islamophobia
industry, practiced by CAIR and the left, no one was holding down either
of the brothers and shoving pork in their mouths or forbidding them
from reading the Koran. The government has carved out broad swaths of
entitlements for Islamic religion in a country where Iftar is celebrated
in the White House and the Department of Justice sues any store that
thinks twice of frowning at a Hijab.
It's the public Islam that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were defending. The
private Islam forbids Muslims to eat pork or drink liquor The public
Islam bars pork or liquor from being sold. The private Islam tells women
to cover their hair. The public Islam establishes an entire system of
police and judges to compel them to cover their hair.
Western liberals like to think of Islam as a private religion, in the
tradition of most of its extant religions, but it isn't. Islam cannot
function for very long as a private religion just as Communism could not
function for very long as a private experiment on a few communal farms.
It is an all or nothing system. Its fundamental expression is public.
In private, it withers and dies.
The private Islam need not be defended with bombs. The public Islam must
be. And as with so many totalitarian systems, when it speaks of
freedom, it means slavery, when it talks of peace, it means war, and
when it claims defense, it means attack.
Why did Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonate bombs at the Boston
Marathon? They were engaged in an old disagreement over political
systems. Terrorists of the left set off bombs to force a political
revolution. Their Islamist fellow-travelers are doing the same thing.
Dig away enough of the trappings of the celebrity murderer and you come
to the ideas buried underneath all the rubble.
The Tsarnaevs are not the first terrorists to kill Americans in the name
of a political idea. If they are radicals and extremists, than so are
the likes of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. What difference is there
between the radicals who detonated bombs to impose the rule of the left
and those who detonate bombs to impose the rule of Islam?
When it comes to the Weather Underground, the media is eager to discuss their ends, but not their
means. And when it comes to the Tsarnaevs, the media will discuss their
means, but not their ends. Dealing with the violence of the left would
only make the left look bad. And dealing with the agenda of the
terrorists would make the left's plan for a multicultural society seem
unworkable. It would make it clear that terrorism is not random, but a
violent means of imposing an idea. And it is the idea that is the issue.
If we are going to discuss Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, let us spend a
little less time on their endless parade of relatives and former
friends, and a little more time on the idea in whose defense they chose
to kill and maim so many. Let us discuss Islam, not just as an abstract
idea, but as a concrete political system. Let us discuss it the way that
we discuss the plans and platforms of the Republican and Democratic
parties. Let us look at Saudi Arabia, at Pakistan and at the new Egypt
to see what this thing that the terrorists would like to impose on us
is.
Despite thousands dead, a searching examination of that sort is exactly
what the media would like to avoid. It does not want another "Better Red
than Dead" or "Better Dead than Red" debate. It wants us to speak of
foreign policy as an isolated American act and of random violence as
arising from thin air. It does not want us to understand the nature of
the struggle. It does not want us to know why we die. It is determined
to keep from us the reason why Muslims kill.
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