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2013-04-28 Home Front: WoT
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Judgment Not Included
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Thomas Friedman actually makes sense
AS police investigators peel away the layers of the Boston Marathon bombing, there are two aspects of this unfolding story to which I want to react: the mind-set of the alleged bombers and the role of the Internet in shaping it. Important news about both was contained in a single Washington Post article on Tuesday.
"The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews," The Post reported. The officials said, "Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev ... do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were 'self-radicalized' through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan."
This is a popular meme among radical Muslim groups, and, to be sure, some Muslim youths were deeply angered by the U.S. interventions in the Middle East. The brothers Tsarnaev may have been among them.
But what in God's name does that have to do with planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon and blowing up innocent people? It is amazing to me how we've come to accept this non sequitur and how easily we've allowed radical Muslim groups and their apologists to get away with it.
| That right there made me question whether Tom Friedman's doppelganger wrote this article... |
A simple question: If you were upset with U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why didn't you go out and build a school in Afghanistan to strengthen that community or get an advanced degree to strengthen yourself or become a math teacher in the Muslim world to help its people be less vulnerable to foreign powers?
| Or at least pick up a rifle and fight in Afghanistan. When we had our revolution we didn't set off bombs in London and Portsmouth, we fought the British on our home soil. And whatever atrocities the Patriots and Loyalists committed against each other (and there were quite a few), we didn't bomb women and children in third countries. If the Tsarnaev brothers had picked up AK's and marched off to Kandahar I would, at a base level, respect that, right up to the moment they got drone-zapped. |
Dzhokhar claims the Tsarnaev brothers were so upset by something America did in a third country that they just had to go to Boylston Street and blow up people who had nothing to do with it (some of whom could have been Muslims), and too often we just nod our heads rather than asking: What kind of sick madness is this?
It's a double non sequitur when it comes from Muslim youths who lived and studied in America, where, if you're upset about something, you have many ways to express your opposition and have an impact -- from organizing demonstrations to publishing articles to running for office. In fact, an American guy named Barack, whose grandfather was a Muslim, did just that. And he's now president of the United States, a job he's used to unwind too early the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Moreover, some 70,000 people, most of them Muslims, have been killed by other Muslims in the Syrian civil war, which the U.S. had nothing to do with -- although many Muslims are now begging us to intervene to stop it. And every week innocent Muslims are blown up by Muslim suicide bombers in Pakistan and Iraq -- every week. Thousands of them have been maimed and killed in attacks so nihilistic that the bombers don't even bother to give their names or make demands. Yet this does not appear to have moved the brothers Tsarnaev one iota.
Why is that? We surely must not tar all of Islam in this. Having lived in the Muslim world, I know how unfair that would be.
| About as unfair as tarring all of Christianity for the obscene acts of an abortion clinic bomber, but that hasn't stopped Andrew Sullivan, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Mother Jones... |
But we must ask a question only Muslims can answer: What is going on in your community that a critical number of your youth believes that every American military action in the Middle East is intolerable and justifies a violent response, and everything Muslim extremists do to other Muslims is ignorable and calls for mostly silence?
As for the role that Web sites apparently played in the "self-radicalization" of the two Chechen brothers, it is yet another reminder that the Internet is a digital river that carries incredible sources of wisdom and hate along the same current. It's all there together. And our kids and citizens usually interact with this flow nakedly, with no supervision.
So more people are more directly exposed to more raw information and opinion every day from everywhere. As such, it is more important than ever that we build the internal software, the internal filters, into every citizen to sift out fact from fiction in this electronic torrent, which offers so much information that has never been touched by an editor, a censor or a libel lawyer.
| Ah, there's the Tom we know and love -- the solution to the problem is more government and more bureaucracy. Always more government... |
That's why, when the Internet first emerged and you had to connect via a modem, I used to urge that modems sold in America come with a warning label from the surgeon general, like cigarettes. It would read: "Attention: Judgment not included."
And that's why the faster, more accessible and ultramodern the Internet becomes, the more all the old-fashioned stuff matters: good judgment, respect for others who are different and basic values of right and wrong. Those you can't download. They have to be uploaded, the old-fashioned way, by parents around the dinner table, by caring but demanding teachers at school and by responsible spiritual leaders in a church, synagogue, temple or mosque. Somewhere, somehow, that did not happen, or stopped happening, with the brothers Tsarnaev. 
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Posted by Beavis 2013-04-28 09:36||
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