Memorial for the Boston Marathon attack on April 15, 2013. Credit: Creative Commons/AnubisAbyss.
On April 20, 2013, days after the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon event, President Obama asked: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?”
Media reported that on April 22, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers accused in the bombings, answered Obama’ s question. He stated they bombed the event in reaction to U.S. attacks on Islam.
Is Obama listening to that answer? How does he interpret it? Are the mainstream media, and in particular Fox News’ Erik Rush, listening to that answer?
I don’t think Erik Rush is listening. I doubt, in fact, that the Obama administration is listening to that answer… heeding the message. And innocent U.S. citizens are paying the price.
There is an old saying, from the Taoist book the I Ching: “He who will not heed will be made to feel.” In what way might we understand that the U.S. government, and this president at this time, have not heeded?
Before we conclude that speculation such as this is blaming the victim, let us review recent U.S. behavior toward the very large Muslim community worldwide.
It is clear from the chronicles of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and other prison sites worldwide that U.S. operatives have been in the habit of pissing on Qur’ans, flushing them down toilets, insulting the dignity of Muslim prisoners, torturing them and detaining them without trial – in some cases for over a decade – in what appear, in retrospect, to be deliberate provocations of Muslim rage.
Let us examine the situation at the Guantanamo detention facility – currently the most glaring case in point. In this facility, which Obama vowed to close back in 2009, reside 86 men who were cleared for release from that hellhole three years ago. Almost all of them Muslim. Under the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act the President can release these men and get them repatriated. Instead, he abruptly closed the office that was arranging their repatriation – and left them in a limbo of indefinite detention.
I repeat: These men have been cleared for release – years ago. One of them, Adnan Latif, died last September after eleven years of imprisonment without trial. He had been cleared for release. He was totally innocent of any crime.
In desperation these men have gone on hunger strike, and have refused to eat or drink for months. The U.S. response? To force these innocent men to submit to searches of their Korans, and to force feed them. Read the editorial published nationwide from Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, one of the hunger strikers, to get an idea of how these prisoners are force fed – with tubes that are too large for the job, in abject misery and pain.
Many detainees at Guantanamo Bay are held indefinitely without trial. Credit: Creative Commons/AslanMedia.
Then the U.S. military raided the Guantanamo prison and attacked the men, who reportedly fought back with improvised weapons. What weapons?! Brooms? Plastic bottles? And how much damage could the prisoners have done in their weakened states?
The cruelty of U.S. policy and actions toward these Muslims is beyond reckoning. Clearly the U.S. is not listening to any sort of moral voice in its execution of such policy and action. Clearly the U.S. is not heeding the misery of these prisoners.
We know quite well from the reportage that the same kind of cruelty was customary in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know that drone attacks have caused horrific death and injury in Pakistan. Do we heed the mass demonstrations in Pakistan against drones?
Do we heed the heroic efforts of the Guantanamo prisoners and their lawyers, to wrest a shred of justice from the U.S. government?
The answer is no. The U.S. government and military complex is unwilling to listen, to listen deeply, to the cries of those whom it has slaughtered, wounded, detained, tormented and ruined.
From this willful deafness come the retaliations, and the acts of vengeance against the U.S. Then the sick mainstream media, Fox in particular, twist the facts and blubber about how “they envy our lifestyle.” Feh! What a disgrace Fox News is.
Let me say this one more time, Mr. Obama: Close Guantanamo and all other such facilities worldwide and bring justice and healing to all whom the U.S. has detained without trial and tortured. End the policy of hateful insult and injury to Muslims.
Will these words, this advice, be heeded? I doubt it.
Boston was a young man and a boy’s cry for meaning and belonging in a world that has legitimized violence as a substitute for both.
I agree with you Josh. The world has spent untold amounts of money
on legitimizing violence. The violence worldwide is presently over-
whelming to contemplate. That is why I wrote this piece. To decry
our loss of meaning through that violence
Could the U.S. Government be implicated in the War of Terrorism by planning, initiating and perpetuated it with the 911 act of terrorism and its response to it since then, more than a decade ago?
Why doesn’t the U.S. Government call for open hearings on the evidence at http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html & http://video.cpt12.org/video/2270078138 in the 911 Explosive Evidence Reports in an effort to stop it?
Why didn’t our security agencies catch the Boston bombers before they could make and set off those bombs?
Why don’t our professed teachers of higher education and their professional associations – and the students of a better way of life – demand to get to the truth of this matter?
I’m copying this piece to the FBI, NSA, and CIA. If you were not living in the USA you would not be allowed to print such hate. You are a lowlife piece of nothing. Leave my country. Go to some Muslin country where you can wallow in hate until it completely destroys you. That is all Muslims live on — hate and oil!
Nice article, and Gitmo should have closed a long time ago. But AWFUL headline. What does this have to do with the Boston Marathon Bombing here? We Bostonians have long wanted Gitmo closed and wouldn’t elect Islamophobes dog catcher here. Is the implication that if you don’t like someone’s politics you should be violent? That’s what Gabby Giffords’s shooter thought. That’s what Timothy McVeigh thought. What asinine implications. The article would be fine if there were no implications it had ANYTHING to do with Boston. Because if it is supposed to, it goes from fine to utterly disgraceful. Those fellows planted a bomb beside an 8-year-old and blew him up. They wanted hundreds of us to die. They doubtless wanted the nails not to hit the lower extremities but instead people’s hearts, stomachs, lungs, eyes, and brains. And then apparently were planning to try to blow up Time Square. Yes, we need to change our Mideast and Gitmo policies. But what any heaven’s name does that have to do with the attempted mass murder of hundreds of people here in Boston– and hundreds more, or thousands, in New York City?
Hmm.. 2 young Chechans given shelter from the chaos at thier former home and then trying to blow it up. Then there is Tikkun taking pity on them
Thank you for the courage to write something like this! If these kind of ideas were to come from a Muslim some of our regular commenters on Tikkun would have a field day with their nasty comments. What you talk about is truly the gist of the problem. Muslims have been seeing the result of bad American foreign policy for decades and they feel like they have no choice but to resort to violence to make their feelings be known. I’m not saying it’s right, but there it is. Just like US drones kills hundreds of innocent children in their fight against militants, there are those who feel the pain of those children and take it out on innocent civilians here. Two wrongs don’t make a right of course, but perhaps both sides could call a truce and try to understand the other’s point of view? Nah, who am I kidding? It’s so much easier to think that all 1.6 billion Muslims of the world are envious of western culture.
Saadia, Do you know who those Drones are actually targeting? The US is not at war with the Muslim world and I see here that you are justifying the actions of 2 Chechans given a new home in the US, away from the violence of their home country, and they go an bomb it. I would give the surviving Chechan the death penalty.
Ms. Feinerman lists many of the reasons used by Islamist terrorists to justify their attacks. While we may agree with all or most of these as wrong in one way or another, we should never be making the case for terrorism or excusing it.
And this blogger only lists one side of the ledger: policies or actions that may be seen as “anti-Muslim.” She neglects the many policies and initiatives that have helped Muslim populations in recent years: saving hundreds of thousands of Somalis with famine relief during the elder Bush’s term, rescuing Kuwait from the Iraqi conquest in 1990-91, establishing and safeguarding the Kurdish safehaven in northern Iraq, belatedly helping to end the slaughter of mostly Muslim Bosnians and Kosovars, which lead to the independence of Bosnia and Kosovo.
Even the misconceived invasion of Iraq in 2003 ended one of the world’s worst dictatorships, and our overlong intervention in Afghanistan ended the cruel misogynist rule of the Taliban. While the future of both Iraq and Afghanistan remain very much in doubt, these countries are currently more endangered by their own internal contradictions and ethnic/religious divisions than by the US.