Here Comes the Post-Boston Anti-Muslim Paranoia
The Tsarnaev brothers don't provide an easy answer for how to stop something like the Boston Marathon bombing from ever happening again. We can't go to war with their country of origin. The men were ethnically Chechen, but Chechnya is a part of Russia, which is definitely not sponsoring terrorism there, since Russians are the usual targets of it. We weren't legally allowed to follow up on Russia's request about the older brother. We can't blame a group since the younger one claims they acted alone. We're already ending the wars he reportedly now says motivated them. And we certainly can't stop the thing that appears to have radicalized them: The Internet, by way of YouTube and maybe an online magazine. Hell, we can't even say we should more closely monitor foreign students, because the Tsarnaevs came here when they were kids. That leaves the Tsnarnaevs' religion — and, apparently, all the liberals who think religious profiling is a bad idea.
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"We know that on the Muslim communities around the world, they do not like us," Fox News' Bob Beckel said Tuesday. "They recruit people from poor areas and turn them into terrorists." And therefore, Beckel said, it's time to take drastic measures:
"I think we really have to consider...that we're going to have to cut off Muslim students from coming to this country for some period of time so that we can at least absorb what we've got, look at what we've got and decide whether some of the people here should be sent back home or sent to prison."
Beckel is wrong in several ways. He's the liberal co-host on The Five, so it's funny he used a debunked lefty argument about terrorism to justify banning Muslim students. Terrorists are not usually poor kids who are so desperate and uneducated they turn to terror. As Christopher Dickey explains in The Daily Beast, "those attracted to terrorism tend to be relatively well educated, gainfully employed, and sometimes come from quite affluent backgrounds." And the vast majority of people from the Tsarnaevs' ancestral home do not support terrorism. A Pew Research Center survey finds that Muslims in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus, which includes Chechnya and Dagestan, don't support religious violence. In Russia, 86 percent of Muslims say violence against civilians in defense of Islam is "never justified," while in the North Caucasus, 93 percent say that.
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The anti-Muslim talking point has been picked up by many. On MSNBC, former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh said, "We're at war, and this country got a stark reminder last week again that we're at war... And not only should we take a pause, when it comes to our immigration, we need to begin profiling who our enemy is in this war: young Muslim men."
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Dana Loesch asks at RedState, "Is Citizenship A New Tactic In The War On Terror?" "It’s a legitimate question," she says, but she does not answer it.
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There's a conspiracy theory floating around that Muslims are involved in more than the Boston marathon. Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman wants to know why law enforcement and the media aren't asking if Muslims made the fertilizer plant blow up in West, Texas. He blames "political correctness." At The National Review, Mark Steyn says all the politically correct multiculturalism is at fault — the Tsarnaevs "lived the diversity dream," and yet still attacked Americans. In an ultimate symbol of how multi-culti liberals are suckers, Steyn writes:
And, in their final hours of freedom, they added a cruel bit of mockery to their crimes by carjacking a getaway vehicle with a “Co-exist” bumper sticker. Oh, you must have seen them: I bet David Sirota has one. The “C” is the Islamic crescent, the “O” is the hippy peace sign; the “X” is the Star of David, the “T” is the Christian cross; I think there’s some LGBT, Taoist, and Wiccan stuff in there, too. They’re not mandatory on vehicles in Massachusetts; it just seems that way.
I wonder, when the “Co-exist” car is returned to its owner, whether he or she will keep the bumper sticker in place. One would not expect him to conclude, as the gays of Amsterdam and the Jews of Toulouse and the Christians of Egypt have bleakly done, that if it weren’t for that Islamic crescent you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at all.
Several sites picked up this cruel bit of mockery — World Net Daily, The Daily Caller, others. Some blogs posted a parody of the sticker, in which the crescent moon "C" has a bomb...
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...instead of the usual bumper sticker, familiar to anyone who's lived in a college town:
This conspiracy theory is not true. As a few sites have noted, the car with the "coexist" sticker (left) was not the Mercedes SUV hijacked by the Tsarnaevs (right) on their way from Cambridge to Watertown last Thursday night.
Rush Limbaugh, too, is raging against political correctness. The problem is that a whole bunch of politically correct people happen to live in the place the terror attacks happened. He says that maybe the people who knew the Tsarnaevs didn't tip off police because they didn't want to be called a bigot. Limbaugh said Monday:
We have one more dead, the MIT policeman, possibly another man, another cop is in critical condition. That might not have happened if they'd been identified sooner and they were recognized by a bunch of people. "Ah, I'm not gonna call it in. That would be prejudicial. I'm not gonna be biased against Muslims. I'm not gonna phone it in. It looks exactly like these two guys, but I'm not gonna phone it in."
In fact, it might have been Massachusetts liberals' own liberalness that inspired the Tsarnaevs to try to kill them. A caller phoned in Monday to say that liberals point out what's wrong with America, and maybe they convinced the Tsarnaevs.
Caller: ... Well, that's what happens when these young guys live in this area when is a liberal hotbed, all they hear all their lives even from people who are supposed to love this country is what a horrible place it is and what's wrong with it, so it's no wonder they turn out to be, as you call it, you know, become radicalized by our own nation.
Limbaugh: They do. They hang around people that don't like America, they get inspired or influenced by it somehow, and it's no wonder. Look, folks, Boston's a hubbub of liberal elite intellectual thought, all the universities there. And if you end up around the wrong people long enough and you're young enough and impressionable enough, then that kind of thing can happen. It is an interesting point about the difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals will tell you what's wrong with the country from the founding. Conservatives will say what's wrong with the country because of liberals, while telling you what's great about the country -- if the liberals would move out of the way.
Behold: The victims of the Boston marathon bombing have become the perpetrators.