So clean that he was having sex with a Christian woman, and when she fell pregnant, she converted to Islam to marry him and then allowed her to go to work while he stayed home with their child.. Wives of ultra-conservative Muslims don't even leave the house, let alone go to work while their husband is the stay at home parent whose inlaws are Christians.... And the
younger brother was so clean that he apparently also sold pot as well as smoked it quite a bit?
Again, you're under the misapprehension that ultra-conservatives must also adhere to the standards they preach. That's why I brought up Ted Haggard; (a point you've avoided like the plague) to show that people don't always practice what they preach. To offer a less-lethal ideology, consider the hypocrisy of the tea party: they don't want no damn gubmint programs...unless
they benefit from them, of course. In that case, it's all good. But you can't have none.
Timothy McVeigh was a truther in the sense that he felt the Government was out to get him. He was an extremist and he killed dozens of people in protest of Waco and Ruby Ridge and also for the hypocrisy he felt about the Iraq war and the role of the US in that war. In that, he is not so different to the brother's at all.
No, you can't be a Truther "in a sense." A Truther is a specific kind of conspiracy theorist. They may also believe in other conspiracy theories, but Truthers aren't becoming terrorists in the name of their beliefs. Timothy McVeigh wasn't a truther. He was a much more dangerous breed of nutjob--one who has antisocial tendencies, an unhealthy obsession with weapons, and a predilection for violence. The Tsarnaev brothers may have been Truthers, but that's not what made them violent. What made them violent was the culture of jihadism in fundamentalist Islam. Whether they stringently adhered to those values is irrelevant--though Tamerlan apparently believed he did, as he abstained from using tobacco or alcohol because of his faith. What matters is what they believed.
Here we have two Chechen Muslims, living in a country that constantly deplored Russia's human rights abuses towards Muslims.. They are so far removed from Iraq and Afghanistan.. Hell, even the extremists in Chechnya have distanced themselves from them and
condemned what they did:
"The command of the Dagestan Vilayat states that Caucasian mujahedeen do not engage in military action with the United States of America," said a statement from the extremist Dagestan Viyalat group, which was reportedly linked in Tsarnaev's YouYube account.
The statement was posted on the Kavkaz Center website. "We fight with Russia, which is responsible not only for the occupation of the Caucasus, but for heinous crimes against Muslims. Even in regards to the enemy state of Russia, with which the Imarat Kavkaz [Caucasus Emirate] does battle, there is an order in effect from the Amir of the [Imarat Kavkaz] Doku Umarov, which forbids attacks on civilian targets."
However, Umarov, a warlord who has earned the nickname of Russia's Osama bin Laden, has in the past taken responsibility for a number of terrorist attacks on Russian soil, most notably the January 2011 bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, and the subway bombings in Moscow in March 2010, which claimed the lives of 40 people.
"For me, there's no clear link between [the Tsarnaevs] and the terrorist underground," military expert Vladislav Shurygin told Russkaya Sluzhba Novostei [Russian Radio Service], a radio station in Moscow.
"But it's clear that the terror attack was connected to them wanting to play. The Internet [is] responsible. They just started browsing the Internet, found some sites connected to extremist activity, and decided to show off."
This is a non-sequitur. Whether they had ties to organized terror is irrelevant to whether they were driven by Islam. They are two separate questions.
Speaking of paranoia...
They were extremists. But they weren't ultra-conservative Muslims.
Ultra conservative Muslims don't sell pot, have pre-marital sex with non Muslim women..
And ultra-conservative Christians don't have gay sex with prostitutes. Right?
They didn't bomb the Boston Marathon because they believe their religion told them to do so.
Another
stunning non-sequitur. Is this why Tamerlan called up his mother and said he was ready to die for Islam? Yeah, that must have been about something else.
Tamerlan believed the FBI was after him for quite a while. He had even told his mother that they were after him and out to get him.
He also told his mother he was ready to die for Islam. You keep omitting that bit. Wonder why...
A fundamentalist Muslim does not smoke pot or sell it. They also don't live in community dorm rooms at university or attend parties and mix with people of the opposite sex at said parties.
And fundamentalist Christians don't blow man-whores. Unless they do, in which case they're hypocrites, or perhaps Tamerlan had different ideas of what it means to be conservative. He didn't believe in the consumption of alcohol or tobacco, which is certainly a conservative belief. They believed in jihadism, which is unquestionably a conservative belief, particularly in this context.
They became extremists, in that they were truther's, they thought the US was waging a war on them because of their religious beliefs and they thought 9/11 was staged by the FBI in a bid to wage said war on Muslims.
Being a Truther and/or believing that the US is waging a religious war does not make you an extremist. It makes you an
idiot, but these aren't by themselves violent ideas. But whether you want to call them extremists or conservatives, what they
definitely were was Islamic jihadists. That cannot be denied. They committed these atrocities because they believed their religion mandated they do so.
And you don't see similarities between Tamerlan and McVeigh? He was fairly anti-social, said he had not made friends.. He was as much of an extremist as McVeigh was an extremist. He thought that the FBI and the Government had lied about 9/11, like McVeigh felt that the FBI and the US Government had lied about Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Tamerlan wasn't anti-social. He had friends, he simply didn't have
American friends. Or so he said. We know he had at least
one American friend, because he married her. And of course there are similarities between McVeigh and the Tsarnaevs. But they're superficial similarities. Ideologically, they're different on a fundamental level. McVeigh was driven by his mental instability; Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were driven by their faith. (I'm less certain of Dzhokhar's motives, but it's no secret Tamerlan was an Islamic jihadist) In any event, the only similarities between he and McVeigh are that they both exploded bombs on American soil. As personalities, they couldn't have been more different.
I get that you want to paint the religion instead of the individuals.
But you are stretching this to the point where you are claiming that a pothead and a guy who knocked up his Christian girlfriend are Ultra-Conservative Muslims.. So you can stop being ridiculous now.
I think he wanted to be. But he was not. And perhaps that was an issue as well. The fact that he did not fit into "ultra conservative Islam" could have played a role. As one Russian expert advised, they may have wanted to show off.
As I said before, all that mattered was what they believed, not how they behaved. They may have had grander notions of what they were than was the reality, but that doesn't change what they believe. And what they believed was the dangerous bit. It doesn't matter whether they
really adhered to the values they preached, it only matters that they believed those values were lacking in society and their faith demanded they remedy the problem.
The religion is not at fault. They, the brother's, are.
Of course the religion is at fault. The religion is what calls for this kind of behavior. Unless you think that all these Muslim terrorists just happen to be crazy. Come to think of it, you probably do, because you'd rather believe something startlingly absurd as that than admit the role of religion in violent behavior.
The thing about religion is that it can make otherwise well-adjusted and normal people do abhorrent things. And we have a textbook example of that here.
