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| Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. |
My sons are innocent, as innocent as all those who are being killed by your country...How can a mother feel whose son is in the claws of a predator...May god bless those who helped my son. The terrorists are the Americans and everyone knows it. My son is the best of the best. -Zubeidat Tsarnaev, after learning that her son, Dzhokar, had been found guilty of murder.
(There was) a distinct change in the woman (I had) come to know, who became noticeably more religious...I noticed that she first put on a hijab before going outside...She had never worn a hijab while working at the spa previously, or inside the house, and I was really surprised...She often mentioned Allah, and the lessons of the Koran." -Testimony of Alyssa Kilzer, a client of Mrs. Tsarnaev in 2008-12.
I’m jealous of my brother who has received the reward of heaven before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions. I ask Allah to make me a martyr, to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven. He who Allah guides no one can misguide. Allah Akbar! -Words scrawled by Dzhokar Tsarnaev on the inside of a boat, his last hiding place, as he lay bleeding to near death with the police closing in.
As far as I can tell, from the reports and interviews, it was you, Mrs. Tsarnaeva, who first brought the poison of Islam into your family's home.
Sure, everyone in your family was nominally Muslim, just like most Americans are nominally Christian. But you wanted them to take it seriously, as they say.
You did it.
Your eldest son may have long had violence in his heart. But Islam gave it a physical outlet. First he abused his wife. Then he became a murderer. Finally, a terrorist.
Your youngest son was different. A "normal kid," according to many reports. Soft-spoken. Not mean. Tolerant, or so it seemed.
And also a lazy, sort of aimless pothead.
But I grew up in Cambridge, and that sounds like half the kids I knew at that age. Those potheads didn't kill anyone.
So I'm going to make some assumptions. Your youngest son was not a rebel. He loved you. He wanted to be like you. He wanted you to be proud of him.
All that time you were drinking more and more of your poison. But because you were doing it, he assumed it must be healthy. And he swallowed it too. The words he wrote in that boat aren't the words of a madman, or even of a selfish or evil man. They are the words of someone who strongly believed (to the point of death) in a particular claim. It was an evil claim, but initially he couldn't see that. That claim was first made to him by you, his own mother, while he was still a boy.
You did it.
If he is condemned to death, then you condemned him. If he ends up being killed by the state, then you killed him. You also killed four innocent people, including an eight-year old boy. What of his mother?
And tens of others had their legs blown off or their organs shredded because of you.
You castrated a man.
You are no mother. You are the antithesis of it.
Not Mary, but in a way, the anti-Mary.
You did this to your son.
Who did it to you?
Well that's the point. A brainwashed person brainwashing their children. And so on and so on.
ReplyDeleteAs I might have told you, Brian, I grew up in Cambridge and my parents still live there. I ran two Boston Marathons and was a spectator at many more. Everything in this story--the people, the places--resonates and rings true to me. The much maligned Rolling Stone piece (linked to in the post) is especially fascinating. I can totally understand the points of view of the various actors. I too bought subs at Izzy's and got high and drunk on the river. And classes and ethnicities did mix in the way described. Cambridge is "liberal" in that way, to the point where if your friend tells you he just converted to Islam, you'd say, "that's cool, man, have another toke." I'm not saying that's good or bad. But it's the way it is.
ReplyDeleteBut it is brainwashing, of course. One change is that when I was a kid, becoming a Muslim was like becoming a Hare Krishna or a Nixon supporter or something. It was spoken about in hushed tones. It was a cult. Obviously many people still look on it in that way--whether "liberal" or not--but these days you would never want to admit it publicly.
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