Posted: 14 May 2013 04:53 PM PDT
The media, in one of
its bursts of manufactured moral panic, has turned its eye on the teenage
girls tweeting and tumblring away in support of Boston Marathon bomber,
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Serial killers have always had their fan clubs. Before the
Boston Marathon bombings spawned the #FreeJahar crowd, there were the
Holmies, who adored James Holmes, who murdered 12 people at a screening of The
Dark Knight Rises.
Even
if Adam Lanza hadn't committed suicide, it's doubtful that he would have his
own Lanzies fan club or a #FreeAdam hashtag. It's not that he killed
children. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev murdered Martin Richard, an 8-year-old boy. James
Holmes murdered Veronica Moser-Sullivan, a 6-year-old girl. Murdering
children is not a turnoff for serial killer groupies, but Adam Lanza's drawn
gnomish face and bowl haircut would be.
Charles Manson had an entire cult around him. Some members like Squeaky
Fromme went on worshiping him and trying to kill in his name even once he was
behind bars. If Fromme were a teenage girl today, she would have a Tumblr and
#InLoveThereIsNoWrong would be a hashtag.
But let's not pretend that there's much of a difference between New York
Times reporters and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's groupies.
The day before the Boston bombings, the New York Times printed an
op-ed from one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards complaining how hard it is to
be on a hunger strike and the media poured on the sympathy as thickly as any
of Dzhokhar’s future groupies.
"It was impossible not to feel a pang of sympathy for Samir Naji al
Hasan Moqbel," Foreign Policy Magazine wrote. The Guardian
described his situation as a "Supreme Injustice". The Daily
Beast added that it was a "National Disgrace" and declared
"There is no way on earth that you could read the recent Times op-ed by
Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel and not feel abject shame." The Nation
called for resuming Gitmo prisoner transfers and releases.
A day before the atrocity that would birth #FreeJahar had taken place; the
media was in full #FreeJihad mode.
The difference between #FreeJahar and #FreeJihad is presentation.
#FreeJaharists are teenage girls and write sentences without periods and
upload GIFs to Instagram. #FreeJihadists have the news and editorial pages of
every paper in the world, not to mention the evening news and the cable news
networks with million dollar budgets, to hammer home their message.
#FreeJahar is really a poor imitation of #FreeJihad. For over a decade, the
media had run itself ragged defending and minimizing the crimes of every Muslim
terrorist. The #FreeJihad media had championed the cause of every Gitmo
terrorist. The New York Times did not suddenly wake up one morning and decide
to run a #FreeSamir op-ed. It had been running sympathetic articles and
editorials about Islamic terrorists all along. The pace of these propaganda
pieces slowed down during the Obama era, but did not stop.
Almost exactly a year before the Boston Marathon bombing, New York Times
correspondent David Shipler wrote an editorial claiming that the FBI was breaking
up terrorist plots that it had invented. "Without the F.B.I., would the
culprits commit violence on their own?" Shipler asked, referring to
Muslim attempts to bomb the Pentagon, the US Capitol and a number of
synagogues.
A year later, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev answered the question in the
affirmative, but that didn't end the outpouring of sympathy.
The New York Times headlined its feature piece on the murderous duo as
"Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying To Fit In." The paper
whitewashed Tamerlan's domestic violence and blamed unfair setbacks to his
boxing career for his killing spree. Despite all the extensive background, no
mainstream media outlet showed any interest in talking to the ex-girlfriend
he slapped around.
The
only difference between this type of #FreeJihad journalism and the #FreeJahar
Tumblrs was the illusion of professionalism.
The #FreeJahar Tumblrs were only doing what liberal papers and blogs had been
doing all along; searching for extenuating circumstances and suggesting that
their favorite terrorist had been framed and needed to be set free. Their
only mistake was bad timing and worse judgment.
Media outlets knew better than to run op-eds by Osama bin Laden's bodyguard
right after September 11. They also limited their claims that Muslim
terrorists like the Bronx synagogue bombers or the Portland Christmas Tree
bomber, had been set up and should be set free, to cases where the FBI had
come in early enough to stop the plot and prevent anyone from being killed.
They were also better at using euphemisms, calling for prisoner transfers
back to their homeland, even though a transfer to Saudi Arabia meant a stay
at a luxurious terrorist rehab center followed by an inevitable return to
terrorism, and at expressing their agendas in someone else's words.
After the Boston bombings, the New York Times doubled down on
#FreeJihad, running an article titled, "Despair Drives Guantánamo
Detainees to Revolt." It quoted a Muslim adviser as saying,
"Only one thing, he predicted, will satisfy the detainees: if someone is
allowed to leave."
And there it was. Around the same time that #FreeJahar was getting started,
the #FreeJihad media was showing them how it was done.
#FreeJihad journalists, like their #FreeJahar counterparts, showed a
troubling tendency to romanticize the murderers they were writing
about.
A New York Times article titled “Jihadist or Victim” described Al
Qaeda member and Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a "soft-spoken man with
a professorial air". When the media finally succeeded in winning Begg's
release, he went back to the UK where he was invited to participate in the
University College of London's "War on Terror Week" by Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab. Two years later, Abdulmutallab became the Christmas Day
Bomber. The New York Times described Abdulmutallab as, how else,
“soft-spoken” and a “gifted student”.
Most terrorists in the pages of the New York Times are soft-spoken, except
when they are being passionate. Sometimes they are even soft-spoken and
passionate. They have curly hair and piercing black eyes. Like Salim Hamdan,
Bin Laden's driver, they are possessed of a "quick grin" or like
Walid bin Attash, a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, a "wry
smile". They are naturally gifted lawyers who have a knack for
pointing out how ridiculous the government's case is.
The difference between these Tiger Beat for the NPR crowd descriptions by the
#FreeJihad media and the #FreeJahar collages is polish. Both romanticize
terrorists and show a studied disdain for their victims. The New York
Times is just better at hiding what it is about than some suburban
teenage girl.
The media's ideological hybristophilia is every bit as obscene as the
#FreeJahar collages. The teenage girl attracted to a murderer because of what
he did has something rotten deep inside. But what does that say about the
ideological hybristophilia of a political movement that seeks out killers and
mass murderers to worship?
Why waste time talking about the Holmies, when there are Che t-shirts on
every campus, and why waste time on teenage girls who turn terrorists into
pin-ups when the entire media does the same thing?
The left is in love with violence. It idolizes killers and then justifies
their crimes. It denies the undeniable; that the only reason it is interested
in them is because they are killers. The Red-Green alliance wouldn't exist if
the Green Muslim side of the alliance wasn't explosively violent. The left
isn't particularly interested in Buddhists or Hindus for the same reason that
it doesn't wear Gandhi shirts or Martin Luther King baseball caps. Its
attractions are strictly fatal.
A movement that once thrived on violence has receded into a mass of suburban
radicals driving Subarus and working to undermine the system from within. All
it has left are the nostalgic memories of terrorists like Bill Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn, now involved in the same unromantic business of
brainwashing students on campuses and exploiting non-profits for the profit
of their agenda. Once upon a time they thought that they were Clyde, but now
they are stuck being Bonnie.
Islamic terrorists are the closest they can come to the
destructive power that thrills them. The siren
song of their revolutions isn't good government, bike paths and nutritious
lunches; it’s murdering their way to power. Working within the system may
work, but what truly makes their pulses race and their legs tingle is putting
a bullet in the system and replacing it with their own.
The left lives its terror dreams vicariously through the terrorism of Islam.
Its fatal attraction to death finds its fulfillment in their murderous arms.
The activists of the left would like you to believe that they defend
terrorists despite their violence. That excuse is as thin as the claims by
serial killer devotees like the Holmies or the #FreeJaharites that they are
in love with their man despite the crimes he is accused of committing. It's
not despite the terrorism that they defend terrorists; it is because of the
terrorism.
They are not pro-terrorist out of principle. It isn't even the ends that they
sympathize with. Few of them really want to live in the Muslim Brotherhood's
Islamist oligarchy. It's the means that appeal to them. If they can't be
Clyde, bombing police stations and offing the pigs, they'll settle for being
Bonnie, hanging on Mohammed's arm while he flies a plane into the World Trade
Center or sets off a bomb at the Boston Marathon.
#FreeJahar isn't some horrid aberration. It's a junior version of the liberal
approach to the War on Terror. We don't have to ask where the idolization of
terrorists comes from. It is spawned from the same #FreeJihad media
that pretends to be outraged by the Holmies and the Jaharites. The Jaharites
are the abominable children of an abominable ideology that hybristophilically
worships the forces that destroy societies because they are all that allows
them to feel powerful and alive.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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