Captured But Still No Explanation as to Why

 

Calm is at last returning to the Boston area after last night's capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the second of the Boston Marathon bombers.  Yet so far, there seems to be no clear explanation of what triggered the carnage and brutal attack on innocent strangers.   There are indications, however, that the older of the bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26,may have drifted into religious extremism and may have been radicalized while visiting Russia last year.    Some family members, in fact, blame the older Tsarnaev for leading his younger brother on a path to darkness.   A column in the New York Times ponders about what lead to such violence and apparent derailing of lies that had seemed in some ways to be tracking the proverbial American dream.  Here are highlights:

“A picture has begun to emerge of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an aggressive, possibly radicalized immigrant who may have ensnared his younger brother Dzhokhar — described almost universally as a smart and sweet kid — into an act of terror,” The Boston Globe reported Friday. 

The Globe quoted a person named Zaur Tsarnaev, who the newspaper said identified himself as a 26-year-old cousin of the suspects, as saying, “I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good.” Tamerlan “was always getting into trouble,” he added. “He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. He hurt her a few times. He was not a nice man. I don’t like to speak about him. He caused problems for my family.”

But what about that image of Dzhokhar as sweet?  On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness. 

Like many young people, the person tweeting from that account liked rap music, saying of himself, “#imamacbookrapper when I’m bored,” and quoting rap lyrics in his tweets. 

He tweeted quite a bit about women, dating and relationships; many of his musings were misogynistic and profane. Still, he seemed to want to have it both ways, to be rude and respectful at once, tweeting on Dec. 24, 2012: “My last tweets felt too wrong. I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their actions.” 

He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking — and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted: “I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.” 

His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther, posting a tweet on Sept. 1 that read in part, “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job.” On Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama that read: “This happened because of you. Thank you.” But on March 20 he tweeted, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” This sounds like a take on a quote from Edmund Burke, who is viewed by many as the founder of modern Conservatism: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 

Hopefully, we will find out what motivated the horrible acts that injured so many and took innocent lives.  The younger Tsarnaev strikes me as accurate on one point: religions are in competition.  Both fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam claim that only they are right and that all need to conform to their toxic belief systems.  And both ultimately cause their followers to view those who are different or who hold different beliefs to as less than fully human and, as a result, set the stage for evil.    Don't believe me?  Just listen to what the Christofascists are saying about Muslims and immigrants in the wake of the Boston bombings.  I continue to believe that a religion free world would be a far better place.