Sympathy for the Dzhokhar

 Posted by  Book Related, Disasters and Tragedies, Terrorism  No Responses »
Apr 232013
 

Apparently I have something in common with the nation’s latest terrorist; we both love going to the Midwest Grill, a Brazilian BBQ Restaurant in my (our?) neighborhood.  We were also both captains of our respective high school wrestling teams and members of the National Honor Society.  His friends from high school talked about him going out of his way to help out, giving rides home, and coming back to his high school to help out for wrestling practice after he had graduated–all things I can relate to.  For all those reasons–not to mention the fact that he only lived about a quarter mile from me–it’s really hard for me not to relate to him.

Which makes the events of the last week all that much more baffling for me.  How could this kid get so twisted that he placed two bombs in a crowd of people, shot a police officer in cold blood, and hijacked a car at gun-point?

I have nothing but sympathy for the friends and families of the victims.  The eight year old boy whose life was ended just as it was beginning.  The graduate student from China who loved living in Boston.  The  restaurant manager from the suburbs who never missed a marathon.  And the MIT officer who was the consummate policeman.

But it’s the bomber, suspect number two, the one who was just arraigned on federal charges from a hospital room yesterday… he’s the one whose story seems most familiar to me.  And yet he’s the one who maybe I will never understand.  Because for all the similarity, how could I understand what drove him to commit such an act of evil–an act that is so viscerally repellent to me I have trouble even watching the footage of it?

Understanding is especially difficult because human motives are never easily understood.  They are never so simple as we would like them to be.  It would be nice if there were a simple, clean, explanation for why he did it.  His evil brother made him do it.  His felt abandoned by his family.  He felt abandoned by his friends.  He fell in with a bad crowd.  He started listening to the wrong preachers.  He was depressed.  He was angry.  He was on drugs.  He was crazy.

But the truth is always more complicated.  The truth is some combination of some or all of those things–and more.  The truth is that human beings are extraordinarily intricate creatures who usually don’t fully know why we do what we do, and who rationalize our behavior after the fact to make ourselves feel better about what we’ve done.

The best we can do is to understand his actions and associations.  Did anyone help him or fund him or advise him?  What else were they planning on doing?  Did they commit any other crimes before the marathon?  Those are all important questions.

As for motive?  Why he did it?  As much as I would love to know… it’s a fool’s errand.

Finally, let me end by quoting Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of the Boston Archdiocese: “Forgiveness does not mean that we do not realize the heinousness of the crime.  But, in our hearts, when we are unable to forgive, we make ourselves a victim of our own hatred.”

Deconstructing Benghazi

 Posted by  2012 Election, Africa, Disasters and Tragedies, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Nomination and Confirmation, Obama Administration, Terrorism  No Responses »
Nov 282012
 

On September 11, 2012, a State Department outpost in Benghazi, Libya was attacked by a local Al Qaeda affiliate, killing four Americans including the Libyan ambassador.  At the time, there were protests erupting at American embassies around the Muslim world over a disgustingly insulting YouTube video about the Prophet Muhammad.  Initial media reports out of Benghazi were that the Americans were killed as a result of one of those protests getting out of hand.  But what the CIA knew at the time, and the media would discover within a couple weeks, was that the attack had actually been carried out by the Al Qaeda affiliate.  Again, it was initially thought that the Al Qaeda affiliate had used a protest outside the American facility as cover to attack; it was eventually determined that there wasn’t actually a protest that night.  The motives of the Al Qaeda affiliate are somewhat obscure; it was initially thought that they were acting in response to the assassination of a particular high-ranking leader within Al Qaeda, although more recently it has come to light that the attack was at least partly in response to the video.

Okay, so there are some important issues that we should be discussing about that attack.  Three come to mind, in particular:

  1. Motive.  Why was the American Ambassador attacked?  Was he targeted, in particular, or was the attack aimed at the facility itself?
  2. Prevention. Should we have known before hand about the attack?  Was there something that we could have done to prevent it?
  3. Security.  Why was the attack successful?  Could reasonable security measures have been taken to prevent the deaths of those four Americans?

Those questions are being asked by both the CIA and the State Department, and I hope that we can learn the appropriate lessons to prevent such an attack from happening again.

But there is a fourth question being asked, and is the most high-profile of all the questions being asked, which really puzzles me:

4. What did the American Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice know and when did she know it? Continue reading »

A Call for Sanity

 Posted by  Foreign Policy, Israel and Palestine, Middle East, Terrorism  3 Responses »
Nov 192012
 

The United States has been dropping bombs, mostly using unmanned drones, on terrorist cells along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border for years now.  These are incredibly remote and sparsely populated areas, we are using the most accurate guidance systems in the world, and we don’t drop all that many of them.  And yet, even so, those bombs sometimes hit the wrong targets–instead of assassinating terrorist leaders, we kill innocent children.  It happens often enough that there is increasing pressure on the Obama Administration from liberal groups to cease these attacks altogether.

The Gaza Strip is home to about 1.7 million people.  It has roughly the same population density as Washington, DC and is about twice as large.  The Israeli rockets and bombs are not as accurate or technologically advanced as what we are dropping in Pakistan,  and dozens of warheads are landing on Gaza every day.  Over 100 Palestinians have died in less than a week, including 24 women and 10 children–and those number will surely climb daily as long as Israel keeps dropping bombs on Gaza.

First of all, Hamas clearly started the current engagement.  I will make no excuses for their behavior–firing rockets into Israel was certainly an act of evil, and they have certainly killed civilians as well.  Last I checked, the Israeli death toll stood at three, and those were surely innocents.  I understand completely why Israel would want to respond to such an attack.  But Israel’s response has been completely disproportional–to such an extent that it will prove to be self-defeating. Continue reading »

Terror, Conspiracy, and Protest in the Middle East

 Posted by  2012 Election, Book Related, Education, Middle East, Terrorism  2 Responses »
Sep 142012
 

Last night’s Rachel Maddow Show was excellent for three reasons, and at least the first two segments are well worth watching. (I realize that she is often quite liberal and quite partisan, but these two segments are not about the election and are well worth your time, whatever your political alignment.)

1) In the first segment, she points to a lot of different news coming out of Libya from a variety of sources which give strong indication that the attacks on the Libyan consulate–the attacks that killed the American ambassador–might have had absolutely nothing to do with the protests about the anti-Muslim video.  Instead, it is increasingly likely that the attacks were coordinated by an al Qaeda affiliate.

2) But it is the second segment that is most interesting.  In the second segment, she interviews Richard Engle, an NBC news corespondent in Egypt.  Among other things, Engle mentions that the protests and protesters really only make up a very small segment of Egyptian society.  For most of the interview, he has been standing with the protests as a dramatic back-drop to the interview.  But at Ms. Maddow’s request, he pans back and shows the entire square where the protests are taking place.  It turns out that the protests are only in a very small corner of this large square, and in most of the square traffic and city life is proceeding quite normally.  So when you read headlines like “Anti-American Fury Sweeps Middle East Over Film,” keep that in mind. Continue reading »

Extremists Need Each Other

 Posted by  2012 Election, Book Related, Disasters and Tragedies, Foreign Policy, Israel and Palestine, Middle East, Terrorism, The Media  No Responses »
Sep 132012
 

If there is one lesson from the tragedy in Libya, it is that extremists need each other.  Anger at terrorist attacks done in the name of Islam causes some extremist in the United States to post an extremely hateful anti-Muslim video, which then is promoted by anti-American extremists in the Arab world to whip up anti-American sentiment, and thereby cause another violent attack on an American embassy.  Extremists feed off of each other to justify their own extremism.  Racist Muslim Imams and racist Jewish Rabbis in the West Bank quote each other’s statements of intolerance and hate to justify their own statements of intolerance and hate–which then get quoted by the other side to justify yet another round of heated rhetoric.  And it’s all fun and games until some men sneak into a house to poison a Jewish family or some teenagers beat a Palestinian boy nearly to death on the street.

But of course, here in America, we must be above this kind of violent extremism, right?  Ari Fleischer says so!  Well, except for the Mosque in Joplin, MO which burned to the ground earlier this year, less than a year after suffering an arson attack.  Or the shooting at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin.  Or the Mosque in Tennessee which was repeatedly vandalized, set on fire, and suffered a bomb threat.

And you know what?  Those attacks on mosques in middle America get really good coverage in the Muslim press.  It would not surprise me at all if the sermons and speeches which drove those extremist kids to attack the American embassies in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen didn’t mention at least one of those acts of arson and vandalism on a house of worship in the Midwest; which were in turn probably justified by the actions of Arab Islamist Imams and the kids that they seem to be able to get to do their bidding.

Extremists need each other.

 Older Entries
© 2012 leftfielder.org login Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha