It’s unclear what Panasenko was doing with the bombs on the train and at his home but I do know that there hasn’t been any discussion of Mykyta Panasenko’s religion or non-stop media attention behind his motivations and plans.

Hmmmm, I wonder why that is?

Jersey City man charged with having explosives on train 8 days before Marathon bombings: cop

(NJ.com)

More than a week before three people were killed and more than 260 people were injured in the Boston Marathon bombings, a Jersey City man carried two homemade explosives on an NJ Transit train, authorities say.

Police also found explosive devices in the Newport Parkway home of Mykyta Panasenko, 27, Jersey City police said today. According to a criminal complaint, Panasenko is charged with having “two destructive devices, specifically improvised explosive devices (IEDs) constructed from a cylinder containing Pyrodex (black powder)” on April 5, the criminal complaint says.

He is also charged with recklessly creating widespread risk of injury or damage to a building which normally contains 25 or more persons by constructing the explosive devices, according to the charges filed by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Port Authority Police Department.

The FBI did not return calls for more details and no one answered the door at Panasenko’s home this afternoon.

Although the arrest was made more than a week ago, it was not reported by authorities. The Jersey Journal learned about the incidents when Panasenko appeared in Central Judicial Processing court to hear the charges Wednesday.

Authorities also charged Panasenko with having two improvised explosive devises at 4 p.m. on April 7 aboard an NJ Transit train leaving Hoboken and bound for Suffern, N.Y., the complaint says.

Earlier this month the Jersey City Police Department’s Bomb Squad responded to the home of Panasenko after getting information from the New York Police Department and the FBI, Jersey City Police Deputy Chief Peter Nalbach said this afternoon.

Inside the residence police found “materials that may have been used to make an explosive device,” Nalbach said, adding that the information came from a tip provided by someone who knows Panasenko.

The complaint charging Panasenko with having explosive devices at his home was signed on April 15, the day of the Boston Marathon bombings, and the complaint charging him with having explosive devices on the train was signed on April 16.

Hannity, O’Reilly, Kilmeade, Bolling and an assortment of Islamophobic guests have been relentless in their attacks on Muslims.:

(h/t: JD)

Fox News Attacks Muslims Relentlessly In Wake Of Boston Bombing

In the days following the Boston Marathon bombings, Fox News has become a haven for talk about the extreme threats posed to the United States by Muslims. Day after day, the network’s hosts and pundits have warned about an Islamic menace which is poised to take down the country.

At the most extreme has been “Fox News liberal” Bob Beckel, whose call on “The Five” to bar or severely restrict Muslim students from coming into America seemed to startle even Dana Perino, George Bush’s former spokeswoman. Beckel stuck by his comments on Tuesday, saying that some of the 75,000 Muslim students in American schools are likely to harbor terrorist ambitions.

“It’s a risky situation,” he said.

“Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade has also suggested putting “listening devices” in mosques, and wondered aloud why there can’t be more racial profiling of Muslims and Arabs. He said this despite widespread reports that bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was actually shouted down at a mosque when he began making radical statements.

There was also Ann Coulter, who called for Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife to be jailed for wearing a hijab, as well as a host of other virulently anti-Muslim commentators; and the state senator who has been calling for Dzokhar Tsarnaev to be tortured.

Bill O’Reilly got in on the act on his show, shouting down the head of the Council on American Islamic Relations when he tried to point out that people like the Tsarnaevs are not representative of all of Islam.

There were no signs that the campaign was letting up on Wednesday, as “Fox & Friends” took up the question of the “infection” of “radical Islam” in America.

A banner reading ‘United We Stand For Peace on Earth’ outside the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph: Allen Breed/AP

The same motive for anti-US ‘terrorism’ is cited over and over

by Glenn Greenwald (Guardian)

(updated below – Update II – Update III)

News reports purporting to describe what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told US interrogators should, for several reasons, be taken with a huge grain of salt. The sources for this information are anonymous, they work for the US government, the statements were obtained with no lawyer present and no Miranda warnings given, and Tsarnaev is “grievously wounded”, presumably quite medicated, and barely able to speak. That the motives for these attacks are still unclear has been acknowledged even by Alan Dershowitz last week (“It’s not even clear under the federal terrorism statute that this qualifies as an act of terrorism”) and Jeffrey Goldberg on Friday (“it is not yet clear, despite preliminary indications, that these men were, in fact, motivated by radical Islam”).

Those caveats to the side, the reports about what motivated the Boston suspects are entirely unsurprising and, by now, quite familiar:

“The two suspects in the Boston bombing that killed three and injured more than 260 were motivated by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials told the Washington Post.

“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ‘the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack,’ the Post writes, citing ‘US officials familiar with the interviews.’”

In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world – violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children:

Attempted “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab upon pleading guilty:

“I had an agreement with at least one person to attack the United States in retaliation for US support of Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants.”

Attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, the first Pakistani-American involved in such a plot, upon pleading guilty:

“If the United States does not get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries controlled by Muslims, he said, ‘we will be attacking US’, adding that Americans ‘only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die’ . . . .

“As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to US policy in the Muslim world, officials said.”

When he was asked by the federal judge presiding over his case how he could possibly have been willing to detonate bombs that would kill innocent children, he replied:

“Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims. . . .

“I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.”

Emails and other communications obtained by the US document how Shahzad transformed from law-abiding, middle-class naturalized American into someone who felt compelled to engage in violence as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone attacks, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims generally, Guantanamo and torture, at one point asking a friend: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?”

Attempted NYC subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, the first Afghan-American involved in such a plot, upon pleading guilty:

“Your Honor, during the spring and summer of 2008, I conspired with others to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and fight against the U.S. military and its allies. . . . During the training, Al Qaeda leaders asked us to return to the United States and conduct martyrdom operation. We agreed to this plan. I did so because of my feelings about what the United States was doing in Afghanistan.”

Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan:

“Part of his disenchantment was his deep and public opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a stance shared by some medical colleagues but shaped for him by a growing religious fervor. The strands of religion and antiwar sentiment seemed to weave together in a PowerPoint presentation he made at Walter Reed in June 2007. . . . For a master’s program in public health, Major Hasan gave another presentation to his environmental health class titled ‘Why The War on Terror is a War on Islam.’”

Meanwhile, the American-Yemeni preacher accused (with no due process) of inspiring both Abdulmutallab and Hasan – Anwar al-Awalaki – was once considered such a moderate American Muslim imam that the Pentagon included him in post-9/11 events and the Washington Post invited him to write a column on Islam. But, by all accounts, he became increasingly radicalized in anti-American sentiment by the attack on Iraq and continuous killing of innocent Muslims by the US, including in Yemen. And, of course, Osama bin Laden, when justifying violence against Americans, cited US military bases in Saudi Arabia, US support for Israeli aggression against its neighbors, and the 1990s US sanctions regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, while Iranians who took over the US embassy in 1979 cited decades of brutal tyranny from the US-implanted-and-enabled Shah.

It should go without saying that the issue here is causation, not justification or even fault. It is inherently unjustifiable to target innocent civilians with violence, no matter the cause (just as it is unjustifiable to recklessly kill civilians with violence). But it is nonetheless vital to understand why there are so many people who want to attack the US as opposed to, say, Peru, or South Africa, or Brazil, or Mexico, or Japan, or Portugal. It’s vital for two separate reasons.

First, some leading American opinion-makers love to delude themselves and mislead others into believing that the US is attacked despite the fact that it is peaceful, peace-loving, freedom-giving and innocent. As these myth-makers would have it, we don’t bother anyone; we just mind our own business (except when we’re helping and liberating everyone), so why would anyone possibly want to attack us?

With that deceitful premise in place, so many Americans, westerners, Christians and Jews love to run around insisting that the only real cause for Muslim attacks on the US is that the attackers have this primitive, brutal, savage, uncivilized religion (Islam) that makes them do it. Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan favorably cited Sam Harris as saying that “Islamic doctrines … still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society” and then himself added: “All religions contain elements of this kind of fanaticism. But Islam’s fanatical side – from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs – is more murderous than most.”

These same people often love to accuse Muslims of being tribal without realizing the irony that what they are saying - Our Side is Superior and They are Inferior - is the ultimate expression of rank tribalism. They also don’t seem ever to acknowledge the irony of Americans and westerners of all people accusing others of being uniquely prone to violence, militarism and aggression (Juan Cole yesterday, using indisputable statistics, utterly destroyed the claim that Muslims are uniquely violent, including by noting the massive body count piled up by predominantly Christian nations and the fact that “murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States”).

As the attackers themselves make as clear as they can, it’s not religious fanaticism but rather political grievance that motivates these attacks. Religious conviction may make them more willing to fight (as it does formany in the west), but the motive is anger over what is being done by the US and its allies to Muslims. Those who claim otherwise are essentially saying: gosh, these Muslims sure do have this strange, primitive, inscrutable religion whereby they seem to get angry when they’re invaded, occupied, bombed, killed, and have dictators externally imposed on them. It’s vital to understand this causal relationship simply in order to prevent patent, tribalistic, self-glorifying falsehoods from taking hold.

Second, it’s crucial to understand this causation because it’s often asked “what can we do to stop Terrorism?” The answer is right in front of our faces: we could stop embracing the polices in that part of the world which fuel anti-American hatred and trigger the desire for vengeance and return violence. Yesterday at a Senate hearing on drones, a young Yemeni citizen whose village was bombed by US drones last week (despite the fact that the targets could easily have been arrested), Farea Al-Muslimi, testified. Al-Muslimi has always been pro-American in the extreme, having spent a year in the US due to a State Department award, but he was brilliant in explaining these key points:

“Just six days ago, my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that terrified thousands of simple, poor farmers. The drone strike and its impact tore my heart, much as the tragic bombings in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine.

“What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”

He added that anti-American hatred is now so high as a result of this drone strike that “I personally don’t even know if it is safe for me to go back to Wessab because I am someone who people in my village associate with America and its values.” And he said that whereas he never knew any Yemenis who were sympathetic to al-Qaida before the drone attacks, now:

“AQAP’s power and influence has never been based on the number of members in its ranks. AQAP recruits and retains power through its ideology, which relies in large part on the Yemeni people believing that America is at war with them” . . .

“I have to say that the drone strikes and the targeted killing program have made my passion and mission in support of America almost impossible in Yemen. In some areas of Yemen, the anger against America that results from the strikes makes it dangerous for me to even acknowledge having visited America, much less testify how much my life changed thanks to the State Department scholarships. It’s sometimes too dangerous to even admit that I have American friends.”

He added that drone strikes in Yemen “make people fear the US more than al-Qaida”.

There seems to be this pervasive belief in the US that we can invade, bomb, drone, kill, occupy, and tyrannize whomever we want, and that they will never respond. That isn’t how human affairs function and it never has been. If you believe all that militarism and aggression are justified, then fine: make that argument. But don’t walk around acting surprised and bewildered and confounded (why do they hate us??) when violence is brought to US soil as well. It’s the inevitable outcome of these choices, and that’s not because Islam is some sort of bizarre or intrinsically violent and uncivilized religion. It’s because no group in the world is willing to sit by and be targeted with violence and aggression of that sort without also engaging in it (just look at the massive and ongoing violence unleashed by the US in response to a single one-day attack on its soil 12 years ago: imagine how Americans would react to a series of relentless attacks on US soil over the course of more than a decade, to say nothing of having their children put in prison indefinitely with no charges, tortured, kidnapped, and otherwise brutalized by a foreign power).

Being targeted with violence is a major cost of war and aggression. It’s a reason not do it. If one consciously decides to incur that cost, then that’s one thing. But pretending that this is all due to some primitive and irrational religious response and not our own actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional. Just listen to what the people who are doing these attacks are saying about why they are doing them. Or listen to the people who live in the places devastated by US violence about the results. None of it is unclear, and it’s long past time that we stop pretending that all this evidence does not exist.

Dirty Wars

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the soon-to-be-released film, “Dirty Wars”, that chronicles journalist Jeremy Scahill’s investigation of US violence under President Obama in Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. That film makes many of the same points here (including the fact that many Yemenis never knew of any fellow citizens who were sympathetic to al-Qaida until the US began drone-bombing them with regularity). Scahill’s book by the same title was just released yesterday and it is truly stunning and vital: easily the best account of covert US militarism under Obama. I highly recommend it. See Scahill here on Democracy Now yesterday discussing it, with a focus on Obama’s killing of both Anwar Awlaki and, separately, his 16-year-son Abdulrahman in Yemen. He also discussed his book this week with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Morning Joe (where he argued that Obama has made assassinations standard US policy).

UPDATE

The incorrect day was originally cited for Goldberg’s column. It has now been edited to reflect that it was published on Friday.

UPDATE II

I was interviewed at length this week by the legendary Bill Moyers about Boston, US foreign policy, government secrecy and a variety of related matters. The program will air repeatedly on PBS, beginning this Friday night (see here for local listings). You can see a preview for the show they released today - here - as well as one short excerpt from the interview on the recorder below:

UPDATE III

Here’s one more excerpt released today by the Moyers show, this one pertaining to exactly the questions raised in today’s column:

An interesting article by Scott Atran on how the media over-emphasis on the Boston Bombings helps terrorists terrorize.

Helping Terrorists Terrorize: How Our Overwrought Reaction Fosters Radicalization

by Scott Atran

“Americans refuse to be terrorized,” declared President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings, “Ultimately, that’s what we’ll remember from this week.” Believe that, and I’ve got some great beach property in Arizona to sell you.

The Boston bombings have provoked the most intense display of law enforcement and media coverage since 9/11. Greater Boston was in full lockdown: “a ghost town,” “a city in terror,” “a war zone,” screamed the headlines. Public transit was stopped, a no-fly zone proclaimed, people told to stay indoors, schools and universities closed, and hundreds of FBI agents pulled from other pressing investigations to exclusively focus on the case — along with thousands upon thousands of other federal, state, and city agents equipped with heavy weapons and armored vehicles. It all came close to martial law, with all the tools of the security state mobilized to track down a pair of young immigrants with low-tech explosives and small arms who failed to reconcile their problems of identity and became amateur terrorists.

Not that the events weren’t shocking and brutal. But this, of course, is part of the overall U.S. reaction to terrorism since 9/11, where perhaps never in history have so few, armed with so few means, caused so much fear in so many. Indeed, as with the anarchists a century ago, it is precisely the outsized reaction that sponsors of terrorism have always counted on in order to terrorize.

There is nothing to compare to the grief of parents whose child has been murdered like 8-year-old Martin Richard, except perhaps for the collective grief of many parents, as for the 20 children killed at Newtown. Yet, despite the fact that the probability of a child, or anyone else in our country, being killed by a terrorist bomb is vastly smaller than being killed by an unregistered handgun — or even being slain by a lawnmower or an unregulated fertilizer plant – our politicians and the public seem likely to continue uncritically to support the extravagant measures associated with an irrational policy of “zero-tolerance” for terrorism, as opposed to much more-than-zero tolerance for nearly all other threats of violence. But given the estimated $300 million the Boston bombing has already cost, and the trillions that the national response to terrorism has cost in little more than a decade, the public deserves a more reasoned response. We can never, ever be absolutely safe, no matter how much treasure we spend or how many civil liberties we sacrifice.

Especially for young men, mortal combat with a “band of brothers” in the service of a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. For many disaffected souls in today’s world, jihad is a heroic cause that holds the promise that anyone from anywhere can make a mark against the most powerful country in the history of the world. But because would-be jihadis best thrive and act in mostly small, self-organizing groups within networks of family and friends — not in large movements or armies — their threat can only match their ambitions if fueled way beyond actual strength by publicity. Today, whereas most nations tend to avoid publicizing their more wanton killings — including civilian killings that might be labeled “state terrorism” (from ethnic cleansings to “collateral” deaths from drones) — publicity is the oxygen that fires modern terrorism.

It is not by arraying “every element of our national power” against would-be jihadis and those who inspire them that violent extremism will be stopped, as President Obama once declared. Although wide-ranging intelligence, good police work and security preparedness (including military and law enforcement defense) is required to track and thwart the expansion of Al Qaeda affiliates into the Arabian peninsula, Syria (and perhaps Jordan), North Africa and East Africa, this is insufficient. Findings from research on “copycat suicide” (where the strongest indicator of the copycat effect is how much media coverage a suicide receives) clearly suggest that media restraint can reduce terrorist contagion. Indeed, as Columbia University epidemiologist Madelyn Gould noted: “We wouldn’t have a billion-dollar advertising market in this country (the US) if people didn’t think you could influence someone else’s behavior.”

The real rub stems from the broader problem of collective action: it is for our common good to deny terrorists media exposure, but each media outlet in a competitive and unregulated market is tempted to break the compact by trumpeting the news. The late Nobel Prize-winning political scientist Elinor Ostromspent the better part of her life trying to tackle the issue of how to better regulate “the commons” (“public goods,” whether water and forests or information and media space). Poring over thousands of cases worldwide, she found local self-regulation to be the most efficient and enduring way to prevent overuse and abuse of the commons, and central government control to be the most problematic.

There are successful examples of media self-restraint from the past. In 1982, killings from cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago area stores were followed by myriad tamperings that were breathlessly covered by the media until public authorities and the media realized that this coverage was spawning more tamperings. The Department of Justice worked with the news media to tamp down the coverage and, mirabile dictu, the tamperings tapered. Of course, the news media back then was remarkably homogeneous compared to today, and it is undoubtedly easier to keep tamperings quiet compared to bombings in public places. But the principle remains the same.

We can break the real, if unplanned, alliance between terrorism and the media through better reporting for the social good, which may prove to be the best business strategy of all (people like business best that helps them and others find happiness, not fear). It’s going to be a hard slog, I know: many men and women at senior levels of the government, military, intelligence and law enforcement understand that overwrought reaction to terrorism helps terrorists radicalize and terrorize, but the powerful if maladjusted relationship between the political establishment and media business drastically subordinates reason to sensation. (A senior FBI official once told me in a meeting at the British Parliament that “If I advocated anything less than zero tolerance for terrorism, they’d have me hanging from my balls from the dome of Congress”). Yet, if we can learn to practice restraint, and show the resilience of people just carrying on with their lives even in the face of atrocities like Boston, then terrorism will fail.

For more, see today’s article in Foreign Policy

Scott Atran, an anthropologist at John Jay College, the University of Michigan and Oxford University, is co-founder of ARTIS Research and author of Talking to the Enemy.

Juan Cole has penned an excellent and important article that puts to rest the Islamophobic claims of bigots that Muslims are more violent than people of other religions.

He mentions murder rates in the Muslim world which are very low compared to the USA and analyzes 20th century political violence by European Christians vs. Muslims. He comes to the low estimate for violence by Christians of European descent as 100 million and 2 million for Muslims. If one were to compare the higher estimates between the two groups it wouldn’t alter much.

Terrorism and the other Religions

by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)

Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.

As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression. This massive carnage did not occur because European Christians are worse than or different from other human beings, but because they were the first to industrialize war and pursue a national model. Sometimes it is argued that they did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England, and that still meant something in the first half of the twentieth century, at least. The Swedish church is a national church. Spain? Was it really unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role in the Civil War? And what’s sauce for the goose: much Muslim violence is driven by forms of modern nationalism, too.

I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame.

Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial wars.)

Belgium– yes, the Belgium of strawberry beer and quaint Gravensteen castle– conquered the Congo and is estimated to have killed off half of its inhabitants over time, some 8 million people at least.

Or, between 1916-1917 Tsarist Russian forces — facing the Basmachi revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian, European rule — Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people. Two boys brought up in or born in one of those territories (Kyrgyzstan) just killed 4 people and wounded others critically. That is horrible, but no one, whether in Russia or in Europe or in North America has the slightest idea that Central Asians were mass-murdered during WW I and looted of much of their wealth. Russia at the time was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be reemerging as one!).

Then, between half a million and a million Algerians died in that country’s war of independence from France, 1954-1962, at a time when the population was only 11 million!

I could go on and on. Everywhere you dig in European colonialism in Afro-Asia, there are bodies. Lots of bodies.

Now that I think of it, maybe 100 million people killed by people of European Christian heritage in the twentieth century is an underestimate.

As for religious terrorism, that too is universal. Admittedly, some groups deploy terrorism as a tactic more at some times than others. Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists in the 1940s, from a British point of view, and in the period 1965-1980, the FBI considered the Jewish Defense League among the most active US terrorist groups. (Members at one point plotted to assassinate Rep. Dareell Issa (R-CA) because of his Lebanese heritage.) Now that Jewish nationalsts are largely getting their way, terrorism has declined among them. But it would likely reemerge if they stopped getting their way. In fact, one of the arguments Israeli politicians give for allowing Israeli squatters to keep the Palestinian land in the West Bank that they have usurped is that attempting to move them back out would produce violence. I.e., the settlers not only actually terrorize the Palestinians, but they form a terrorism threat for Israel proper (as the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin discovered).

Even more recently, it is difficult for me to see much of a difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre.

Or there was the cold-blooded bombing of the Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel and a gang of Hindu nationalists. Chillingly, they were disturbed when a second bomb they had set did not go off, so that they did not wreak as much havoc as they would have liked. Ajmer is an ecumenical Sufi shrine also visited by Hindus, and these bigots wanted to stop such open-minded sharing of spiritual spaces because they hate Muslims.

Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in Japan supported militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, for which their leaders later apologized. And, you had Inoue Shiro’s assassination campaign in 1930s Japan. Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/ Myanmar are urging on an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya.

As for Christianity, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda initiated hostilities that displaced two million people. Although it is an African cult, it is Christian in origin and the result of Western Christian missionaries preaching in Africa. If Saudi Wahhabi preachers can be in part blamed for the Taliban, why do Christian missionaries skate when we consider the blowback from their pupils?

Despite the very large number of European Muslims, in 2007-2009 less than 1 percent of terrorist acts in that continent were committed by people from that community.

Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each religion, and within secular religions of Marxism or nationalism. No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.

It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above. Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance, and the more powerful they are, the more violence they seem to commit. The good news is that the number of wars is declining over time, and World War II, the biggest charnel house in history, hasn’t been repeated.

Peter King

Rep. Peter King’s hearings accomplished nothing and so he proposes an unconstitutional strategy like the one the NYPD carried out and that produced exactly zero results.

After Boston, we should put Muslims under surveillance, says Rep. King

Aliyah Frumin (MSNBC)

President Obama cautioned the nation not to rush to judgment about the Boston Marathon bombers. But that’s not stopping Republican Rep. Peter King.

King, who chairs the House subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, is urging authorities to beef up their surveillance of Muslims in the U.S.  following Friday night’s arrest of bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Police must “realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there,” the New York lawmaker told National Review.

King—who spearheaded controversial hearings on the radicalization of Muslim-Americans in 2011—also told CNN that “we can’t be politically correct. I think we have to see, has radicalization extended into the Chechen community?”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was taken into custody on Friday night in Watertown, Mass., after a day-long manhunt following an early-morning shootout with police in which his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, was killed. The two are suspected of planting bombs that killed three people and injured more than 170 near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday.

The ethnic Chechen brothers came to the U.S. in 2002 after fleeing the war-torn region. The two were born in the former Soviet territory now known as Kyrgyzstan. Those who knew the family have said Tamerlan Tsarnaev had become a devout Muslim in the past few years.

Dzhokhar became a naturalized citizen in 2012, while Tamerlan had a green card and was reportedly hoping to become a citizen.

Read the rest…

No one is guilty of the Boston Bombings except for the individuals directly responsible and those who may have supported them. As we have noted on this site in the past such attacks cannot and should not be used to stigmatize whole communities nor should it be used to undermine our civil liberties.

There are still a lot of questions regarding possible motivations, were the attacks a result of the extremist ideology of AlQaeda and its affiliates? Some early circumstantial evidence would indicate that is the case and we will learn more as the investigation continues and Djohar Tsarnaev is interviewed.

The following article by award winning author Wajahat Ali was written before the FBI put out pictures of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Djohar Tsarnaev but he is on point when he notes that Muslims should not be made to apologize for the criminal actions of a few:

Despite all this — and a rich history that traces back to the founding of the country — American Muslims are asked to investigate, defend, explain, self-police and apologize for our own identity and communities to absolve ourselves of guilt by association. In front of a nameless, faceless hostile judge and jury, we are interrogated to prove beyond an unreasonable, irrational doubt that we are indeed loyal, patriotic, America-holic, justifiably outraged and remorseful for acts of violence “we” did not commit– all 1.5 billion of us along with millions lumped in as “Muslimy,” including Sikhs, Arab Christians, Hindus and Persian Jews.

“Please don’t let it be a Muslim”

by Wajahat Ali

The twin bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, which killed two and injured at least 176, inspired divergent responses to a sudden, senseless tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of the blasts, some marathon participants continued running to nearby hospitals to donate blood,  many Boston citizens offered free food and shelter to strangers, and diverse communities sent financial donations and prayers of peace and comfort to victims and their families. Others, however, chose to fan the flames of anti-Muslim bigotry and hysteria for sake of sensationalistic headlines and divisive ideological agendas.

Upon learning of the tragedy, many Muslims worldwide began the obligatory minority prayer: “Please don’t let it be a Muslim (suspect), please don’t let it be a Muslim.” Ever since September 11, Muslims have learned that the criminal action of one unhinged individual unfairly casts guilt by association on anyone suspected of being “Muslimy.”

On the day of the blasts, The New York Post, the Mr. Magoo of newspapers, declared that a Saudi Arabian national was being held as a suspect. The headline persisted even after Boston police commissioner Edward Davis confirmed law enforcement had no suspects in custody. Never letting facts get in the way of publishing fiction as truth, the Post also claimed 12 people had died, instead of the then-confirmed two fatalities. (The fatality count has since grown to three.)

A Rush To Misjudgment: CNN Faulted for Racially Charged, Erroneous Reports on Boston Marathon Case

Democracy Now

As media punditry speculated and regaled in the rhetoric of assigning and implying Muslim blame for the Boston Marathon bombings by perpetuating insinuations about: the ‘Saudi suspect,’ the ‘dark skinned’ foreigner and the Muslim terrorist angle we had our first hate crimes.

A Bangladeshi-American man named Abdullah Faruque was attacked as he left an Applebee’s restaurant on Monday night. (the article in the International Business Times strangely assumes that if Faruque had not been Arab the attackers would have been dissuaded from attacking him.):

In an incident that echoes the 9/11 backlash in New York City, a Bangladeshi man was assaulted after the Boston Marathon bombings by four men in the Bronx on the mistaken assumption that he was an Arab.

The New York Post reported that 30-year-old Abdullah Faruque, who was born in Bangladesh but grew up in the Bronx, was having dinner at a Bronx restaurant Monday night when three or four Hispanic men apparently wanted revenge for the Boston Marathon bombings earlier in the day (presumably they had already ascertained that the Boston blasts were perpetrated by Arabs or Muslims).

The paper noted that the four men viciously beat Faruque while shouting  “f–king Arab” at the Bengali man as he stepped out of the Applebee’s restaurant on Exterior Avenue in Melrose for a smoke.

“One of the guys asked if I was Arab,” Faruque told the Post. “I just shook my head, said like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ I didn’t even know that  Boston happened because I had a busy day.”

As Faruque, a network engineer, turned to return to his meal, one of the other men said: “Yeah, he’s a f–king Arab,” leading to a brutal pummeling that dislocated Faruque’s left shoulder and left him semiconscious.

“Before I could grab the door, they started swinging at me,” Faruque.

“I’ve been jumped before. If you can’t win, you back up, you try to protect yourself.”

Only after he returned home and learned of the Boston tragedy from the TV news did Faruque understand.

“I saw the news, and then it hits me: That’s why I got jumped,” he said.

The New York Police Department is probing the beating as a hate crime.

Palestinian Heba Abolaban was attacked in Malden, Massachusetts as she walked with a friend and their children:

A Palestinian woman said she was assaulted and aggressively harassed while walking with her infant daughter and friend near Malden Center late Wednesday morning, in an apparent hate crime motivated by Monday’s attack at the Boston Marathon.

Malden resident Heba Abolaban said she and her friend, both wearing hijabs, were walking with their children on Commercial Street when a man forcefully punched her left shoulder and began shouting at them.

“He was screaming ‘F___ you Muslims! You are terrorists! I hate you! You are involved in the Boston explosions! F___ you!’” Abolaban remembered. “Oh my lord, I was extremely shocked.”

She said the man – described as a white male in his thirties wearing dark sunglasses – kept shouting and walking toward her as she backed away.

“I did not say anything to him,” she said. “Not even that we aren’t terrorists…he was so aggressive.”

After about two minutes, Abolaban said the man continued his brisk walk toward Malden Center. Shaken, Abolaban called her husband in tears, and then 911.

“The police came and were so kind and helpful,” she said, though no suspects were arrested in the incident.

Right-wing Christian evangelist and famed Skeletor impersonator Pat Robertson is at it again, implying that the Boston Bombings were committed by Muslim terrorists. To be clear for the hundredth time, no one knows who committed this horrible act, or why. And it is completely disrespectful to both the victims of the tragedy, and to the nation’s and world’s Muslim communities to continue to declare that all terrorist actions are committed by Muslims, especially when there is absolutely no evidence to back up these claims. Watch the video here.

Pat Robertson On Boston Bombing: “Don’t Talk To Me About ‘Religion Of Peace,’ No Way”

From the April 16 edition of CBN’s The 700 Club:

ROBERTSON: Our hearts go out to these people who were wounded and injured. On a joyous day, Patriots’ Day, in Boston and the Boston Marathon draws people in from all around the world, about 26 or 7 thousand participants about 17,000 I understand it finished — crossed the finish line before this bomb went off.

But to think that somebody would be so vicious, so evil as to want to kill little children, and maim families who were there rejoicing in a sporting contest on a beautiful day in Boston, it just makes you sick at your stomach. Don’t talk to me about religion of peace, no way.