Friday, April 19, 2013

I Am Sure Progressives Everywhere Are Disappointed: Chechnyans, Not Tea Partiers

From April 19, 2013 NDTV:

Watertown: The two suspects in Monday's Boston Marathon bombing have been identified as men from Chechnya.

Earlier today they killed a police officer at the MIT campus, injured a transit officer in a firefight and threw explosive devices at police during their getaway attempt in a long night of violence that left one of them dead and another still at large Friday, authorities said.

A law enforcement intelligence bulletin obtained by the AP identified the surviving bomb suspect as 19-year-old Dzhokhar A Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Massachussets.
I know that some of my readers are sympathetic to the Chechnyans because of the brutality with which the Russians have suppressed the Chechnyan independence movement.  But this bomb wasn't set off in Russia, or aimed at Russians.

Reading this account from the April 19, 2013 Wall Street Journal sounds like an episode of 24:
The hunt for the younger Mr. Tsarnayev prompted a broad shutdown of public facilities in the Boston area. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick asked people throughout Boston to take shelter and stay indoors.

The Federal Aviation Administration closed the low-level airspace above roughly four miles in northwest Greater Boston as the search goes on. Logan International Airport in Boston tweeted that it "is open and operating under heightened security." It urged fliers to check their flight status before heading to the airport.
 This account from the April 20, 2013 The Australian indicates that the dead one may have used a suicide vest:
They lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and their family had fled the Chechen civil war for Kazakhstan and appeared to have been granted asylum in the US.

Tamerlan was reported to have been killed by explosives on his body, suggesting he may have detonated a suicide vest.
If there was any question about his motivations:
"I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them," he recently posted on his website.

On his YouTube page he posted religious videos, including a video of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter.
 But apparently not against the evils of murdering complete strangers.  Priorities.

5 comments:

  1. Cynthia Tucker, a leftist opinion writer, on twitter:

    "If bombers r from Caucasus, it shows futility of racial profiling for terrorists. These guys r the original Caucasians."

    I wonder what prompts this need to protect people from profiling. Has there been some deep rights violation that came about from profiling?

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  2. Clayton said...
    Japanese-American internment.

    True for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans in mid-1942. That wasn't even profiling, it was pointless bigotry.

    In December 1941, the FBI rounded up about 2,000 Japanese-Americans who were genuine security risks: young men who had studied in Imperial Japan and received military training there, leading members of pro-Japan organizations, known associates of Japanese diplomats. These people were identified by "profiling" - by paying special attention to ethnic Japanese, who were disproportionately likely be disloyal. This allowed the handful that were to be identified and removed.

    Similar methods were applied to German-Americans and Italian-Americans. That should have been the end of the problem (it was for the Europeans) but hysteria, racism, and greed led to the disgraceful mid-1942 action.

    In any case, "profiling" need not be based on appearance alone. Much of the complaining is that Moslems are considered more suspicious than others. Moslems of any appearance may be jihadists. Some Middle Easterners are swarthier than typical Europeans, but others are not.

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  3. Yes, you're right, of course. I should have said in recent years, although I guess WWII was not all that long ago.

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  4. Only certain profiles are considered examples of bigotry. When a woman is assaulted, we always use profiles -- for example, ex-boyfriends.

    In Slate, a blogger argued against using profiles to target Islamists. His reason? A lone, right winger white man was was more likely. In other words, he used one profile to argue against a different profile. The profile he wanted was the acceptable one, a white man profile.

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