Dissing Our Marathon Moments

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

23 April 13

hile prosecutors still have to prove in a court of law that Dzhorhar Tsarnaev and his now dead brother were, in fact, the Boston Marathon bombers, the rest of us would do well to consider in depth how leading lights on the American Right have already reacted.

Senator Lindsay Graham, Republican of South Carolina, urges that we treat the culprits as enemy combatants, while others want to torture the remaining brother. How quickly these brave hearts ask us to give up our historic standards of jurisprudence! Former vice president Dick Cheney has left a terrifying legacy to answer for.

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, blames the bombing on our immigration system, trying to derail its reform with a breathtaking display of old-fashioned American nativism. He sounds like a bad replay of the anti-Italian and anti-anarchist furor in Boston of the 1920s that led to the judicial lynching of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I do not know where Grassley's forebears came from, but I'm willing to bet that most of them were not Native Americans.

Journalist David Horowitz, my former colleague on the New Left monthly Ramparts and now one of America's most toxic polemicists, rushes to tell us exactly why the Tsarnaev brothers did what the authorities accuse them of doing. “They hated us because they were fanatical believers in the idea that Mohammed had desired them to kill infidels and purify the earth for Allah," he writes. “This is the face of our enemy and the sooner the delusional liberals among us wake up to this fact, the safer all of us will be."

How utterly bizarre! If Horowitz has it right, which he does not, the overwhelming majority of American Muslims must be refusing to fulfill their Prophet's desires, since they condemn the killing and maiming in exactly the same way as the rest of us do.

These knee-jerk reactions - a rejection of due process, a nasty nativism, and a bilious hatred of Islam - are completely reactionary, and most Americans appear to see them that way. But, please dig deeper. None of these wing-nuts are reacting to what actually happened in Boston. They are simply repeating the noxious ideas they harbored before the first bomb ever exploded.

Where most of us are still reeling from the horror or wondering how the surviving victims will deal with having their lives forever altered by a truly loathsome act of terror, the ideologues of the Right are already waving the bloody shirt and trying to use yet another national tragedy to create the kind of hateful society they have long wanted. The rest of us need to tell them off publicly before they do to us far worse than any terrorists ever could.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.