I just saw Rudy 911 speaking as an expert on terrorism on CBS. I only hope we can hear more of his insights as this situation develops.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26 year-old brother of the second Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had a YouTube page where he posted religious videos, including a video of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter. Among those videos is one dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan which is embraced by Islamic extremists—particularly Al Qaeda. The videos posted on what appears to be Tsarnaev’s YouTube page may shed light on the motivations for the attack on the Boston Marathon. The prophecy states that an invincible army will come from the region of “Khurasan,” a large portion of territory in central Asia.
For those of you who can’t watch the live video feed, here’s the Globe’s live blog. And here’s another thread.
Joseph Nobles
Yeah, here’s a link to that imam ranting about Harry Potter.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/hagee-harry-potter-secular-humanism-ruining-america
Oh, sorry, that’s John Hagee. My bad.
Mr. Longform
Doghouse Riley summarizes:
arguingwithsignposts
The breathless speculation, reckless rush to judgement and absurd connections being spawned at record speed when the situation is still ongoing tells me we as a nation haven’t learned a goddamn thing from the past dozen years. If anything, we’ve gotten worse.
MomSense
Mad Eye was right. Constant vigilance!
scav
White Hat’s posting that “career and money” are most important in life sounds downright 100 per cent UnAmurican, no? Luckily (alas) he did go on to the Islam worldview, which proves he’s as mixed a message as many Christians, not that they’d notice.
Walker
Interesting story about how they got identified. It appears one of them dropped the bag right next to Jeff Bauman, the guy in the wheelchair in the famous “Cowboy Hat” picture. When he came to in the hospital, he identified them so that police knew what to look for in the surveillance videos:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-19/boston-bombing-victim-in-iconic-photo-helped-identify-attackers.html
Patricia Kayden
Rightwingers will be very happy that the terrorists were arguably Muslims (born in Chechnya). Wonder how they’ll connect this to bombing Iran.
some guy
if you get a chance check out Jen Rubin’s post this morning. Al Qaeda in Syria have found a new cheerleader, and she blogs for WaPo
amk
@arguingwithsignposts: Yup. The ugly side of social media.
PeorgieTirebiter
Bringing out the big mallets to pound square pegs into newly discovered round holes.
Maude
@arguingwithsignposts:
Plus the “experts” will be out in droves spouting nonsense.
I blame Obama.
Laur
A lot of people will be misspelling Kyrgyzstan today
MomSense
@arguingwithsignposts:
We haven’t learned a thing. My grandmother was studying German in high school when WWI happened–and they stopped the classes. She said that her poor teacher got a lot of grief from everyone.
I’m thinking that breathless speculation and reckless rushing to judgment have been human responses forever.
Hal
Damn. Just woke up. Wth? This whole thing went down at light speed.
Raven
@Hal: 10:45pm est
gene108
@Patricia Kayden:
Once they finish fapping that thankfully it wasn’t a right-wing nutjob, they may get around to thinking about ways to invade Iran or maybe even Syria.
The cumulative orgasm among right-wingers that it wasn’t one of them will soon be a thing (unfortunately) to behold.
Also, too if you can’t write-off one of your own as never being capable of doing something like this, even though it wasn’t one of yours this time, you still have issues you need to deal with.
RAM
I note the first name of the terrorist who has been killed, which seems pretty apt to me.
Valdivia
the younger one seems/sounds like he had a totally ‘normal’ life until he graduated high school. Maybe brother got him into whatever they were into in the last year?
eric
@arguingwithsignposts: Like the epic Gummi-DeMilo episode ;)
beltane
@Hal: It began last night. Some of us haven’t gotten much sleep. At least you’re well rested.
RobertDSC-iPhone 4
Crazy stuff.
WereBear
@Joseph Nobles: Good one! It’s not at all odd that their fundamentalists, and ours, share obsessions, is it?
Hawes
This seems that toxic mix of alienation and isolation combined with religious zealotry. Eric Rudolph with a Quran instead of a Bible.
NotMax
For any of you with armor thick enough to frequent right-wing sites and/or FOX, has anyone been shouting Furriners! Benghazi! yet?
beltane
Younger brother’s classmates are in shock. Tsarnaev described as a “sweetie, a delight” https://twitter.com/jodikantor/status/325237033889050626
What a waste.
WereBear
The one thing I felt confident about (don’t know if I expressed this or not) was that the Marathon was targeted because of some athletic connection, some big frustration that its very nature, triggered.
And now we hear that one of them had Olympic Boxing dreams. I’m assuming that didn’t pan out.
The wingnuts are very bad at recognizing mental illness. They don’t actually believe in it, do they? But that is what the bottom line is in ALL this violence.
Valdivia
@beltane:
I wonder if after he left high school he lost that anchor and fell under the radicalization of his brother who was already very much out there? I know arm-chair psychology but really you see the kid’s picture and it’s so obvious he is just a kid wrecking all this havoc. yikes.
MomSense
@NotMax:
They are on my fb news feed. :(
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Clicking around, that’s what it looks like. Not too hard to imagine from an armchair perspective, the younger one was a “normal kid” who attended U Mass- Amherst — buzzfeed has an interview with a highschool friend, the elder a boxer with a domestic violence arrest who had recently become devout (Guardian).
Joseph Nobles
@WereBear: They do believe in it. But it’s just so much easier to recognize when the subject is being fundy about the wrong God.
beltane
@Valdivia: If this was his only close relative in the States it is very easy to see what happened here. The older brother acted out of hate, the younger brother out of love for his elder sibling.
Valdivia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: @beltane:
it kind of breaks my heart for the kid. how much destruction he has wrecked. just incredible.
beltane
A 45 year old woman with the same last name and living at the same address was arrested for shoplifting at Lord & Taylor last summer http://natick.patch.com/articles/arrests-1-600-in-clothes-stolen
I haven’t heard as much news about L & T in the past 20 years as in the past 2 days.
elmo
@Joseph Nobles:
first smile I’ve had on my face all morning. Nicely done.
Elie
@WereBear:
I don’t completely disagree but think that its more complicated than that…
We have a lot of social illness where people don’t feel that they “fit in” or are prevented from becoming members of the dominant tribe. It can be particularly acute in young men who also have all the hormones and intensity to assert their needs.
Human beings are still animals and our instincts have to be tamed through social interaction, education and sublimation. We have a big and challenging culture which while diverse and welcoming on one hand, can also be tremendously exclusive and alienating on the other — especially economically in the United States. Its hard and getting harder to break into and stay in the middle and upper brackets and that frustration never leads to a good place.
My guess is that there is a complex story here — more complicated than their just being jihadists. On one level, it sounds a little like the younger brother was partially assimilated in our culture. We’ll see. Scary, tragic, sad, all of these IMHO.
NotMax
Forgive my ignorance, but as I don’t own (nor want) one, there have been statements that authorities are worried he might have a cellphone which could be used to detonate something.
Can’t a cellphone location be determined to within about 300 yards or so?
Raven
@NotMax: if it is on probably.
the Conster
@beltane:
That’s the L&T I occasionally shop in, when I’m looking for something a little more upscale than Macy’s. My two daughters and my nephew all live right off Cambridge Street a few blocks from where the suspects lived, and are posting pics of the SWAT teams outside their windows. It’s not hard to think that how and whether you live or die on any given day is just pure random luck.
NotMax
@Raven
My very limited knowledge in this area seems to remember that it doesn’t have to be on; that so long as the battery is in place it can be pinpointed.
NotMax
@NotMax
Amend that to “charged battery.”
He’s certainly had other things on his mind of late.
Valdivia
@NotMax:
also the sim card. you have to get rid of the sim card as that is what they use to track you.
eta: that if they prepared ahead they could have gotten various sim cards and used different ones. if they are tracking ALL cell activity then they will be looking for a needle in a hay stack instead of just tracking his phone unless he is using a prepaid burner/ I watch a lot of the wire!
NotMax
@Valdivia
Thank you for the info.
Suppose there is a technical parameter I’m missing, but don’t readily see how a tower knows how to connect with the phone if it doesn’t know where it is.
The Moar You Know
@gene108: My office wingnuts will be coming into work in about an hour. I’m going to get shit on all day for daring to suggest it might be one of them when it was really an Evil Mooslim, just like they said all along.
Thanks, Terror Brothers.
Valdivia
@NotMax:
they need a number–like he bought a phone in his name–to track it. maybe by looking at family phone records they can find those numbers. alternatively if they know where the bomb is they can track signals around it–but they would be better off just turning off the towers so he can’t use the phone to detonate it if they don’t have a specific number.
mdblanche
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m hearing he attended UMass-Dartmouth and they locked the campus down?
MrSnrub
@mdblanche: He was seen on campus after the Monday bombings. His dorm is being evacuated.
Hal
Cable news should be insufferable for quite some time. Stop saying “I hate to speculate, but…” Either speculate and own it or shut the fuck up.
Chuck Todd is terrible, but it was fun to listen to him say the President was being cautious when not using the word terrorism day one of the bombings. Maybe Rachel Maddow had a talk with him in the halls of MSNBC.
Villago Delenda Est
@Joseph Nobles:
That’s the thing.
These fundie assholes are pretty much the same, whether or not they’re nominally Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or Rastafarian.
Villago Delenda Est
@Joseph Nobles:
But it’s the same asshole invisible sky buddy. The “God of Abraham”. The guy who destroyed the Tower of Babel. The deity who flooded the world. Islam just has a different word for the same vengeful fucked up asshole deity than the Christians and Jews do.
Who doesn’t exist, no matter what language you call out his name in.
Incitatus for Senate
Gun sales are going to go through the fucking roof when this is over. I know it’s not very rational, but I can’t help wishing I had a 12 gauge right now.
Lee
Well at least they are Caucasian….
I’ll show myself out ;)
Elie
@Lee:
But if they are “Mooslim”, they get to be considered honorary at least brown…
Another Halocene Human
@beltane: No kidding. The shoplifting is a nice distraction. Waiting to read the long-form article about the Tsarnaev crime family.
@Lee: *does something percussive*