The Wall Street Journal’s reporting team sifts through Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s past and finds a familiar-sounding tale of radicalization.
People who knew him say Tamerlan would express outrage when he perceived a religious slight and was critical of Muslim immigrants’ efforts to assimilate in the U.S.
In one incident last November, Tamerlan confronted a shopkeeper at a Middle Eastern grocery store in Cambridge, near a mosque where he sometimes prayed, after seeing a sign there advertising Thanksgiving turkeys.
“Brother, why did you put up this sign?” the shopkeeper, Abdou Razak, recalled him asking angrily. “This is kuffar“—an Arabic reference to non-Muslims—“that’s not right!”
Tim Carney pre-emptively criticizes the people who would respond to Boston with a surge of closed-circuit cameras. (Surely the fact that police nabbed a suspect so quickly argues against their use; but how many terror attacks will happen on days when the media has descened on a city already?)
Manu Raju asks whether Ted Cruz will lead the opposition to an immigration bill, even if his line—“the president wants a political issue more than a bill”—is sounding progressively less based in reality.
Maureen Dowd writes a classic of “magic president” fan fiction.
And horrible bomb suspect tribute poetry—it exists!
