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Mark Steyn on last week’s events.
This has been a strange and deadly week in America. On Monday, two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, the first successful terrorist attack on a civilian target on American soil since 9/11. And yet a mere two days later,
Boston’s death toll was surpassed by a freak fertilizer accident at a small town in Texas.
In America, all atrocities are not equal: Minutes after the Senate declined to support so-called gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the president rushed ill-advisedly on air to give a whiny, petulant performance predicated on the proposition that one man’s mass infanticide should call into question the constitutional right to bear arms. Simultaneously, the media remain terrified that another man’s mass infanticide might lead you gullible rubes to question the constitutional right to abortion, …
… The politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of those near-parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing dweebs of the fin de civilisation West are prone. As the headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope the BostonMarathon Bomber Is a White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot of support for his general predisposition. “The thinking, as we have been reporting, is that this is a domestic extremist attack,” declared Dina Temple-Raston, NPR’s “counterterrorism correspondent.” “Officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary, there’s Hitler’s birthday, there’s the Oklahoma City bombing, the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.” Miss Temple-Raston was born in my mother’s homeland of Belgium, where, alas, there were more than a few fellows willing to wish the Führer happy birthday back when he was still around to thank you for it. But it was news to me it was such a red-letter day in the BayState. Who knew? At NPR, “counterterrorism” seems to mean countering any suggestion that this might be terrorism from you know, the usual suspects. …
Ed Morrissey reports on the shocking fact that neither of the Tsarnaev brothers had a gun permit.
Take some comfort in the fact that this will almost certainly be the last dumb meme in the gun-rights debate for a long time to come. After the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly planted bombs at the Boston Marathon, shot a cop to death in an ambush, and then wounded several more in a gun battle, the fact that the two didn’t have Massachusetts handgun permits has apparently made national news:
“The two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, who police say engaged in a gun battle with officers early Friday after a frenzied manhunt, were not licensed to own guns in the towns where they lived, authorities said on Sunday.
In the confrontation with police on the streets of a Boston suburb, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were armed with handguns, at least one rifle and several explosive devices, authorities say.
But neither brother appears to have been legally entitled to own or carry firearms where they lived, a fact that may add to the national debate over current gun laws. Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected a bill to expand background checks on gun purchases, legislation that opponents argued would do nothing to stop criminals from buying guns illegally.”
And which last week proved. Criminals rarely go to the trouble of applying for gun permits because (a) previous convictions would keep them from getting one anyway, and/or (b) they don’t want to establish paper trails to themselves for police to find. Criminals, especially those who want to commit high-profile crimes, usually steal their weapons (or buy them illegally, as Reuters notes) and discard them after the crimes so that investigators can’t tie them to the weapons. …
Jay Nordlinger posts that David Axelrod believes the president thinks the bombing was related to Tax Day.
David Axelrod said something interesting after the terror in Boston. (He is the president’s chief political strategist.) He said the president was connecting the bombing to Tax Day.
Friday night, I was sitting in a concert hall. The critic sitting behind me was saying to his friend, “I assumed this was right-wing domestic terror. It happened on Tax Day.”
The other week, a U.S. Army instructor issued a list of threats — a list headed “Religious Extremism.” At the top of the list was “Evangelical Christianity (U.S./Christian).”
Two years ago, Mayor Bloomberg in New York guessed that the Times Square terrorist was opposed to Obamacare.
I thought of something last week (and if you heard me say it on my podcast with Mona Charen, forgive the repetition). When Kennedy was assassinated, the speculation was that this was right-wingers. JohnTower’s family had to be evacuated. He was leading the Goldwater operation, I believe, and there were death threats against his family.
Then it transpired that the killer was a Communist. And a prominent liberal said, “Now our grief can be pure.”
In my view, American education — the weight of the culture — has done something sick to many American minds. If the country cannot recognize the threats against it — specifically Muslim extremism — it probably can’t defend itself. …
Roger Simon posts on the Salon expectations about the bombers.
When you write about titanic events in progress, you risk appearing a fool. Nevertheless I have some strong feelings this morning with Dzhokar Tsarnaev still at large that I cannot resist spelling out.
Over the last few days I have wanted to write about an article published by David Sirota on Salon, which was commented on admirably by my colleagues Roger Kimball and Richard Fernandez. Sirota wrote to express his hope that the Boston Bombers would be white Americans, because otherwise our putative race-hatred of Muslims or people of color of any sort would be enhanced. It’s all about “white skin privilege,” doncha know?
Today Sirota seems like an imbecile (well, he did before), but I would venture to say he doesn’t know why. So I will spell it out for him: the War on Terror (euphemism alert) is not about skin color. It is about ideology, Islamic ideology.
The Tsarnaevs are white people in the purest sense. They are Caucasians from the Caucasus, of all things, but they believe in Allah — do or die, apparently.
Too young for the civil rights movement, Sirota is an adherent of an ultra-bourgeois nostalgia for racism that hides under the ludicrous rubric “progressive.” It’s laughable, but it’s also sad and dangerous. …
… The Islamic people of the world need a reformation in the most extraordinary way. Ignoring that, as do the Sirotas of our culture, will not help it happen.
Interesting Chechen background by Stephen Green at VodkaPundit.
Starting back in the early ’60s, Colin McEvedy wrote a remarkable series of historical atlases for Penguin Books. Each covered a particular era and a particular area, usually Europe. And each map was exactly alike — except the borders. And every two-page spread was set up the same way: a map on the right-hand page, and explanatory text on the left. McEvedy’s writing style was that of an avuncular Oxford dean: friendly, warm, and knowing.
Later revisions of his work have more maps, but McEvedy’s words — those wonderful words! — had been tramped down by the boot of political correctness. But used copies of the original editions aren’t too hard to find. I highly recommend them, and still read the whole series every few years.
All of this comes to mind because of the craziness in Boston today, straight outta Caucasus.
To understand why, here’s one of McEvedy’s maps from The Penguin Atlas of Recent History, with “recent history” in his estimation being everything in Europe since Napoleon:
Look closely at the right hand side of the map in Tsarist Russia. There, in the northern Caucasus in the Krasnodar-Maykop region, you’ll see a bit of “Russian” territory indicated by a dotted line. If you can’t read it at this scale, it’s labeled “Unsubdued Circassians.” The territory is within the Russia Empire, but the Tsar’s writ did not run there. “Unsubdued” was how the Russians found the area when they took it from the Turks in the 1820s. And that’s how it stayed until the Soviets really clamped the lid down a century later.
It’s no coincidence that as the Soviet Union began to fall apart in the mid-to-late ’80s, the first violence to erupt was in the Caucasus. It’s a crazy patchwork of ethnicities and religions, everybody with legitimate grievances against everybody else.
We need two more maps to really see it. …
Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.