In an effort to create “solidarity” with Palestinian suffering the ASA voted to support a boycott of a nation whose injustices are underwritten by the “A” in the ASA’s name.
There are other senses in which the Muslim world, by and large, has not ‘excelled,’ and for that perhaps we should be grateful, not caustic. For you cannot claim the planet and eat it too. Nothing the Muslim world has accomplished can possibly compare to the harm done by Western technologies and modes of consumption.
Where Bush offered shock and awe, Obama offers the hem and haw. War, but not a serious one; aid, but of the “non-lethal kind”; a desire to draw red lines, but a tendency to hope nobody notices them.
I think we should be cautious about attempts to frame the Boston bombings, or for that matter any profound act of violence, mainly as a failure of (or an injunction for) “interfaith cooperation.”
RD bloggers have rightly asked the question of the depth of the “piety” of the Tsarnaevs. That too misses a vital point. I do not for a moment discount the sincerity of the feelings for Islam by the Tsarnaev brothers. But, what Islam was the object of those feelings? I would offer that it was for an “Internet Islam”—for an abstract, compact, easily rendered Islam, fed by the representations flowing from out of the ether!
