OUT: Deflecting discussion of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Islamic radicalization by theorizing that his boxing-related head injuries might’ve made him bomb the Boston Marathon and shoot at cops.
IN: Deflecting discussion of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Islamic radicalization by theorizing… well, just read this from the NYT.
A Battered Dream, Then a Violent Path
It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen.
The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin, had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant.
From one year to the next, though, the tournament rules had changed, disqualifying legal permanent residents — not only Mr. Tsarnaev, who was Soviet-born of Chechen and Dagestani heritage, but several other New England contenders, too. His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction.
Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge, Mass., to Dagestan showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.
Awwwwwwww. Poor baby! He was left adrift.
So it’s the Golden Gloves’ fault. Poor Tammy* just couldn’t stand having his dreams thwarted, and the rest was inevitable. Shame on you, Golden Gloves.
What utter horse$#!+. Plenty of people have dreams, and plenty of people fail to achieve them. They don’t all run out and plant pressure-cooker bombs next to little kids.
Tim Blair has more on the coping mechanisms employed by our friends on the left, as they “try to make sense” of something that has a simple explanation. The first one is to avoid it altogether. Don’t mention Islam, or bury it near the end of the story. Make it an afterthought. The media did their best in the immediate aftermath of Tammy’s death and Jahar’s capture, but it was unavoidable.
The second coping device is the complexity disguise, whereby the simple realities of Islamic terrorism are submerged beneath tonnes of pointless, faux-sophisticated chatter. US academic Juan Cole steps up to the plate:
“This sounds to me like a classic father-son struggle, and a tale of adolescent rebellion, in which radical Muslim vigilanteism appears mainly as a tool for the young men to get back to their father, and perhaps to wipe off the shame they had begun feeling about the family having been on the wrong side of the Chechnya fundamentalist uprising. They were playing the nihilists Arkady and Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The shame of the secular uncle may have been mirrored from the other side in the shame of the newly religious-nationalist adolescents.”
I prefer Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s more direct explanation, as related to the Chinese man whose car he and his brother hijacked during their bid to flee Boston. “I did that,” said Tamerlan, referring to the marathon attack. “And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge … I’m a Muslim.”
The left hears “dog whistles” in everything their opponents say. But when a member of a Designated Victim Group speaks plainly… well, it couldn’t be that simple, could it?
The third coping mechanism, as Blair notes, is to blame teabaggers. In the four days between the Boston Marathon bombing and the Tsarnaevs’ pathetic attempt at escape, you couldn’t turn on a TV without hearing some theory about Patriot’s Day, or Tax Day, or Columbine, or Hitler’s birthday, or some other supposed “wingnut holiday.” But the most brazen example of this, the most indelible image, is from all the way on the other side of the world. From the Sydney Morning Herald, on the same day the Tsarnaevs went out like a couple of bitches:
Way to go, SMH. Which, incidentally, also stands for “shaking my head.”
But don’t worry. None of our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the media will learn a lesson from this. They haven’t learned from the dozens of other times they’ve pulled this crap. And what’s their incentive to learn, anyway? They just move on, pretending they never said what they said, ignoring those of us who are presumptuous enough to remind them.
You don’t know your place. Shut up.
*I’m calling Tamerlan “Tammy,” because I know it’s what he would’ve wanted.
Update: Tammy also liked to beat women. You’re up, Amanda Palmer. Let’s have another “empathetic” poem.
