Sultan Knish
The media, in one of its bursts of manufactured moral panic, has turned
its eye on the teenage girls tweeting and tumblring away in support of
Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Serial killers have always
had their fan clubs. Before the Boston Marathon bombings spawned the
#FreeJahar crowd, there were the Holmies, who adored James Holmes, who
murdered 12 people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.
Even
if Adam Lanza hadn't committed suicide, it's doubtful that he would
have his own Lanzies fan club or a #FreeAdam hashtag. It's not that he
killed children. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev murdered Martin Richard, an
8-year-old boy. James Holmes murdered Veronica Moser-Sullivan, a
6-year-old girl. Murdering children is not a turnoff for serial killer
groupies, but Adam Lanza's drawn gnomish face and bowl haircut would be.
Charles Manson had an entire cult around him. Some members like Squeaky
Fromme went on worshiping him and trying to kill in his name even once
he was behind bars. If Fromme were a teenage girl today, she would have a
Tumblr and #InLoveThereIsNoWrong would be a hashtag.
But let's not pretend that there's much of a difference between New York Times reporters and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's groupies.
The day before the Boston bombings, the New York Times printed an
op-ed from one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards complaining how hard it
is to be on a hunger strike and the media poured on the sympathy as
thickly as any of Dzhokhar’s future groupies.
"It was impossible not to feel a pang of sympathy for Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel," Foreign Policy Magazine wrote. The Guardian described his situation as a "Supreme Injustice". The Daily Beast added
that it was a "National Disgrace" and declared "There is no way on
earth that you could read the recent Times op-ed by Samir Naji al Hasan
Moqbel and not feel abject shame." The Nation called for resuming Gitmo prisoner transfers and releases.
A day before the atrocity that would birth #FreeJahar had taken place; the media was in full #FreeJihad mode.
The difference between #FreeJahar and #FreeJihad is presentation.
#FreeJaharists are teenage girls and write sentences without periods and
upload GIFs to Instagram. #FreeJihadists have the news and editorial
pages of every paper in the world, not to mention the evening news and
the cable news networks with million dollar budgets, to hammer home
their message.
#FreeJahar is really a poor imitation of #FreeJihad. For over a decade,
the media had run itself ragged defending and minimizing the crimes of
every Muslim terrorist. The #FreeJihad media had championed the cause of
every Gitmo terrorist. The New York Times did not suddenly wake up one
morning and decide to run a #FreeSamir op-ed. It had been running
sympathetic articles and editorials about Islamic terrorists all along.
The pace of these propaganda pieces slowed down during the Obama era,
but did not stop.
Almost exactly a year before the Boston Marathon bombing, New York Times
correspondent David Shipler wrote an editorial claiming that the FBI
was breaking up terrorist plots that it had invented. "Without the
F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own?" Shipler asked,
referring to Muslim attempts to bomb the Pentagon, the US Capitol and a
number of synagogues.
A year later, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev answered the question in
the affirmative, but that didn't end the outpouring of sympathy.
The New York Times headlined its feature piece on the murderous
duo as "Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying To Fit In." The paper
whitewashed Tamerlan's domestic violence and blamed unfair setbacks to
his boxing career for his killing spree. Despite all the extensive
background, no mainstream media outlet showed any interest in talking to
the ex-girlfriend he slapped around.
The only difference between this type of #FreeJihad journalism and the #FreeJahar Tumblrs was the illusion of professionalism.
The #FreeJahar Tumblrs were only doing what liberal papers and blogs had
been doing all along; searching for extenuating circumstances and
suggesting that their favorite terrorist had been framed and needed to
be set free. Their only mistake was bad timing and worse judgment.
Media outlets knew better than to run op-eds by Osama bin Laden's
bodyguard right after September 11. They also limited their claims that
Muslim terrorists like the Bronx synagogue bombers or the Portland
Christmas Tree bomber, had been set up and should be set free, to cases
where the FBI had come in early enough to stop the plot and prevent
anyone from being killed.
They were also better at using euphemisms, calling for prisoner
transfers back to their homeland, even though a transfer to Saudi Arabia
meant a stay at a luxurious terrorist rehab center followed by an
inevitable return to terrorism, and at expressing their agendas in
someone else's words.
After the Boston bombings, the New York Times doubled down on
#FreeJihad, running an article titled, "Despair Drives Guantánamo
Detainees to Revolt." It quoted a Muslim adviser as saying, "Only one
thing, he predicted, will satisfy the detainees: if someone is allowed
to leave."
And there it was. Around the same time that #FreeJahar was getting
started, the #FreeJihad media was showing them how it was done.
#FreeJihad journalists, like their #FreeJahar counterparts, showed a
troubling tendency to romanticize the murderers they were writing
about.
A New York Times article titled “Jihadist or Victim” described Al
Qaeda member and Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a "soft-spoken man with
a professorial air". When the media finally succeeded in winning Begg's
release, he went back to the UK where he was invited to participate in
the University College of London's "War on Terror Week" by Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab. Two years later, Abdulmutallab became the Christmas Day
Bomber. The New York Times described Abdulmutallab as, how else, “soft-spoken” and a “gifted student”.
Most terrorists in the pages of the New York Times are soft-spoken,
except when they are being passionate. Sometimes they are even
soft-spoken and passionate. They have curly hair and piercing black
eyes. Like Salim Hamdan, Bin Laden's driver, they are possessed of a
"quick grin" or like Walid bin Attash, a mastermind of the USS Cole
bombing, a "wry smile". They are naturally gifted lawyers who have a
knack for pointing out how ridiculous the government's case is.
The difference between these Tiger Beat for the NPR crowd descriptions
by the #FreeJihad media and the #FreeJahar collages is polish. Both
romanticize terrorists and show a studied disdain for their victims. The
New York Times is just better at hiding what it is about than some suburban teenage girl.
The media's ideological hybristophilia is every bit as obscene as the
#FreeJahar collages. The teenage girl attracted to a murderer because of
what he did has something rotten deep inside. But what does that say
about the ideological hybristophilia of a political movement that seeks
out killers and mass murderers to worship?
Why waste time talking about the Holmies, when there are Che t-shirts on
every campus, and why waste time on teenage girls who turn terrorists
into pin-ups when the entire media does the same thing?
The left is in love with violence. It idolizes killers and then
justifies their crimes. It denies the undeniable; that the only reason
it is interested in them is because they are killers. The Red-Green
alliance wouldn't exist if the Green Muslim side of the alliance wasn't
explosively violent. The left isn't particularly interested in Buddhists
or Hindus for the same reason that it doesn't wear Gandhi shirts or
Martin Luther King baseball caps. Its attractions are strictly fatal.
A movement that once thrived on violence has receded into a mass of
suburban radicals driving Subarus and working to undermine the system
from within. All it has left are the nostalgic memories of terrorists
like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, now involved in the same
unromantic business of brainwashing students on campuses and exploiting
non-profits for the profit of their agenda. Once upon a time they
thought that they were Clyde, but now they are stuck being Bonnie.
Islamic terrorists are the closest they can come to the destructive power that thrills them. The siren
song of their revolutions isn't good government, bike paths and
nutritious lunches; it’s murdering their way to power. Working within
the system may work, but what truly makes their pulses race and their
legs tingle is putting a bullet in the system and replacing it with
their own.
The left lives its terror dreams vicariously through the terrorism of
Islam. Its fatal attraction to death finds its fulfillment in their
murderous arms.
The activists of the left would like you to believe that they defend
terrorists despite their violence. That excuse is as thin as the claims
by serial killer devotees like the Holmies or the #FreeJaharites that
they are in love with their man despite the crimes he is accused of
committing. It's not despite the terrorism that they defend terrorists;
it is because of the terrorism.
They are not pro-terrorist out of principle. It isn't even the ends that
they sympathize with. Few of them really want to live in the Muslim
Brotherhood's Islamist oligarchy. It's the means that appeal to them. If
they can't be Clyde, bombing police stations and offing the pigs,
they'll settle for being Bonnie, hanging on Mohammed's arm while he
flies a plane into the World Trade Center or sets off a bomb at the
Boston Marathon.
#FreeJahar isn't some horrid aberration. It's a junior version of the
liberal approach to the War on Terror. We don't have to ask where the
idolization of terrorists comes from. It is spawned from the same
#FreeJihad media that pretends to be outraged by the Holmies and the
Jaharites. The Jaharites are the abominable children of an abominable
ideology that hybristophilically worships the forces that destroy
societies because they are all that allows them to feel powerful and
alive.
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