Yeah those bastards!
Lets blow up some people and prove em wrong!
Dang it, not where did I put that anger and grief. I just saw it a few minutes ago!
It’s looking like she was a delusional ingrate before Boston.
What is the evidence for that? Even if she were the mastermind, things went wrong (from the mastermind’s perspective), and it’s only been a couple of weeks.
I can easily imagine someone cynically using her grief to fuel conspiracy theories or anti-US sentiment, though.
Hey, just out of curiosity, what makes you think your post couldn’t be reported as a vague discussion of jihad? Or mine, for that matter.
Is there anything grief can’t excuse?
She’s an idiot who raised two murderers. Fuck her and her “grief”.
Does the same go for all mothers of criminals?
Sure. That’s another way to look at it albeit, not from the perspective I was asking you to look at it.
My speculation/opinion was from their own perspective. I’ll tell you - it is not easy for any relationship one might have to be overshadowed by 9/11 and “Islamic terrorism” in the back of people’s mind.
I’ll also note that you did not really address my question so here it is again… if they were so hell-bent on destruction wouldn’t they hold a view of “yes, we did it”? Why would they choose to believe the exact opposite “no, we did not do it”?
You could ask the same thing of Holocaust deniers, many if not a majority of whom are anti-semites. While perhaps not all being secretly enamored of the Holocaust, certainly a majority of these antisemites would prefer there to be fewer Jews around in the world. Yet they still deny.
So outwardly claiming an event did not occur is not mutually exclusive with believing that it should have happened, or being okay with it if it did happen.
Of course there are things grief can’t excuse. Who said differently? I’m saying grief, especially fresh grief, excuses denial and making rather idiotic public statements.
I also don’t think it’s fair to blame a mother for the crimes of her adult children, or to hold her in any way responsible. Did she actually raise them so that they would grow up to be murderers, or are you just upset and lashing out? (See what I did there?)
OK, I can understand that people who have historically seen their community get fucked over by whoever’s in charge – or who at least suckled at the breast a history of their community being deliberately fucked over by whoever’s in charge – will, no surprise, grow up to believe it entirely plausible and even more likely than not that whoever’s in charge is deliberately plotting to fuck them over. And societies that deliberately fuck over their subjects will eagerly pump up an allegation that some other society is doing it just as a tu quoque.
To be fair, Conspiracism sounds a whole lot more plausible to someone who grew up in the former USSR (or in the heyday of dictatorships and kleptocracies in Latin America), because in fact they WERE getting systematically fucked over as a result of hidden backroom plots. Change the scenario, and a lot of people become shocked in disbelief that life can still suck even in a free country and they decide there must still be a plot.
But really, it’s close to as proven as we can humanly get that the Tsarnaev brothers DID commit their crimes. Having an explaination for their motivation does not excuse or mitigate. Sorry, Mom, your kid screwed the pooch big time and he’s going down for it.
While at it, I do say that unfortunately if I’m in a LEA and the Russians (or Chinese, or Saudis) call up saying “check out this guy” I will have in the back of my mind the question if this is a good faith lead or if it’s just wanting me to do their dirty work of giving someone a hard time…
Well, since we are speculating here I’d go to suggest that - from what I know about being expelled by ethnic cleansing and history - for most people expelled, things are not over.
I’d suppose there is a vibrant under the radar Chechen independence political movement in various Western countries (just like many other before) working on the ways in which they can mount a comeback and fight Russians again. There were already two wars and things are still the same for them. In doing this little spy/manipulation exercise, Russians seek to undermine Chechen national aspirations by rearranging the battle not along the lines of national independence (world-wide supported) but along the lines of Islamic radicalism (world-wide opposed). Something similar that happened to Palestinians where earlier, you had a clear national independence movement by Fatah only to be replaced by clearly Islamic radical Hamas movement that was - as we all know - initiated and supported by Israelis to delegitimize Palestinians (highly successfully I must note).
And another, much wider in scope effect is that now you have Chechens associated with terrorism in a country that accepted them and may have even supported them which means their whole network of under-the-radar political and national movement is being disrupted in virtually any other Western country.
If I were Russian government, I’d call that a knockout - case closed.
I wish I could’ve written it like this 
It is nuanced properly and I fully agree with this.
Just a little note from history - former Tito Yugoslavia secret police called “UDBA” had as one of the primary tasks assassination of Croatian independence movement leaders all across Europe for decades. I recall, people whispering about it but nobody had any proof and officially it did not happen. Only after Croatian war for independence in 1990’s people learned about the scope of secret operations against Croatian national movement in various Western countries.
So, yeah, the part I bolded, I can fully second it.
Uh… no, we don’t all know that.
Your case against Russia is really a lot more persuasive without this morsel attached to it… hey, maybe you are the false-flag agent of discredit, sent by Putin to make suspicions of his Chechen intrigues look like :crazy: talk!
Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB123275572295011847.html
Yes, I’ve read that very article.
Perhaps you missed my poor attempt at humor. Never mind.
The serious point is, it doesn’t help the discussion about Russia-Chechnya
Well, funny or not, I think that Israel-Palestinian example is VERY useful in illustrating how independence movement can be weakened by doing exactly what I believe Russians are trying to do - switch from national struggle to radical Islamists struggle. Even Serbian propagandists tried to frame Bosnian-Muslim and Kosovars struggle as “good old Christians” fighting the hordes of radical Muslims. So, yeah, I think it is good to point to end-game of strategy that Russians may employ.
Still, saying that Israel “initiated” Hamas is not accurate.
I’m pretty sure Russia didn’t import the first Islamist elements to Chechnya either, though they certainly set up the conditions to make them welcome in some quarters, and they have manipulated perceptions of their role.
She worked as a beautician?
Oh bejeezus. A job where you have hundreds of customers and basically chit chat the whole day long with them? And with this high profile case and todays internet and social media?
If she IS a batshit crazy extremist, there are going to be former customers coming out the wood work to expose her.
And if they do expose her for what it sounds like she was, then it is not really much of a leap to assume she passed the crazy onto her son. And therefore she is to blame for this disaster upon innocents AND what happened to her sons. And if that is the case I hope deep down she realizes that.
My comment was intended to imply that she’s not just a normal, rational person who is overcome by not wanting to believe that her sons are terrorists, but rather that she has a history of extremist and conspiracy theorist views and that she knew at least one of her sons did as well.