The Boston Globe invests in some long-form journalism for the Marathon Bombers. A lot of shoe-leather on this one with some video included.
I get the family-breakdown angle: Once hopeful immigrants who did keep it together for awhile undergo a messy divorce and decline into crime and drift. Tamerlan, perhaps, was hearing voices and refusing to get treatment, looking instead to God, an apparently reality-denying mother and his ethnic homeland to some extent. In addition to a failed boxing career, he increasingly isolated himself and may have been involved in a murder at some point. That’s certainly one path to radicalization.
Dzhokhar couldn’t keep it together as time went on either, younger and with more opportunities, he started selling pot out of his dorm room, taking increasing risks & failing-out of school. The opportunities and institutions America extended to this family could not remedy the family’s failures and bad decisions.
Uncle Ruslan saw some of this coming:
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Still worth thinking about: Only one group of religious immigrants to the United States, should there be such a family breakdown or inability to adjust to a new life and challenges, has access to a global network of Islamist terrorism, exploiting faith for a frontline fight. Through chat-rooms, online imams, possible connections at the mosque, travel and literature etc. a few stragglers can become deadly threats, willing to kill us here at home.
‘Even as Jahar continued to party with friends in the early months of the year, spending hundreds of dollars at hotels, restaurants, and clubs in repeated trips to New York City, he was apparently spending more time in Cambridge in the apartment occupied by his brother and family, friends said.
Behind the scenes, he and Tamerlan were hatching their plot. Whose idea it was — and who orchestrated the scheme — is known only to Jahar, and perhaps to the police and prosecutors who have interrogated him.
Around this time, prosecutors say, Jahar downloaded onto his laptop several radical Muslim publications that focused on jihad and enemies of Islam. One contained a foreword by the late Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Al Qaeda propagandist who died in a drone strike two years ago and is alleged to have inspired at least two terrorist plots against Americans.’
Still worth thinking about.
Related On This Site: A Few More Thoughts On The Marathon Bombing: Free Speech Is Key…
Michael Moynihan At Newsweek: ‘http://www.jihad.com’
Link sent in by a reader to Alexander Hitchens essay: As American As Apple Pie: How Anwar al-Awlaki Became The Face Of Western Jihad
Christopher Hitchens At Slate: ‘Lord Haw Haw And Anwar Al-Awlaki’…From CSIS: ‘Rick “Ozzie” Nelson and Tom Sanderson on the Future of Al Qaeda’,Lawrence Wright At The New Yorker: ‘The Man Behind Bin Laden’…From Slate: ‘In Aleppo, Syria, Mohamed Atta Thought He Could Build The Ideal Islamic City’…Repost-Philip Bobbitt Discusses His Book ‘Terror And Consent’ On Bloggingheads
From Foreign Affairs: ‘Al Qaeda After Attiyya’
The Hitchens factor, and a vigorous defense of free speech: From Beautiful Horizons: ‘Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan at the 92nd Street Y’…Via YouTube: ‘Christopher Hitchens Vs. Ahmed Younis On CNN (2005)’…From Michael Totten: ‘An Interview With Christopher Hitchens’Islamism, Immigration & Multiculturalism-Melanie Phillips Via Youtube
From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism…From The Middle East Quarterly Via A & L Daily: Europe’s Shifting Immigration Dynamic
Kenan Malik In The Spiked Review Of Books: ‘Twenty Years On: Internalizing The Fatwa’-Salman Rushdie