From The Atlantic
The Tsarnaev brothers don’t provide an easy answer for how to stop something like the Boston Marathon bombing from ever happening again. We can’t go to war with their country of origin. The men were ethnically Chechen, but Chechnya is a part of Russia, which is definitely not sponsoring terrorism there, since Russians are the usual targets of it. We weren’t legally allowed to follow up on Russia’s request about the older brother. We can’t blame a group since the younger one claims they acted alone. We’re already ending the wars he reportedly now says motivated them. And we certainly can’t stop the thing that appears to have radicalized them: The Internet, by way of YouTube and maybe an online magazine. We can’t even say we should more closely monitor foreign students, because the Tsarnaevs came here when they were kids. That leaves the Tsnarnaevs’ religion — and, apparently, all the liberals who think religious profiling is a bad idea.
“We know that on the Muslim communities around the world, they do not like us,” Fox News’ Bob Beckel said Tuesday. “They recruit people from poor areas and turn them into terrorists.” And therefore, Beckel said, it’s time to take drastic measures:
“I think we really have to consider…that we’re going to have to cut off Muslim students from coming to this country for some period of time so that we can at least absorb what we’ve got, look at what we’ve got and decide whether some of the people here should be sent back home or sent to prison.”
Beckel is wrong in several ways. He’s the liberal co-host on The Five, so it’s funny he used a debunked lefty argument about terrorism to justify banning Muslim students. Terrorists are not usually poor kids who are so desperate and uneducated they turn to terror. As Christopher Dickey explains in The Daily Beast, “those attracted to terrorism tend to be relatively well educated, gainfully employed, and sometimes come from quite affluent backgrounds.” And the vast majority of people from the Tsarnaevs’ ancestral home do not support terrorism. A Pew Research Center survey finds that Muslims in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus, which includes Chechnya and Dagestan, don’t support religious violence. In Russia, 86 percent of Muslims say violence against civilians in defense of Islam is “never justified,” while in the North Caucasus, 93 percent say that.
The anti-Muslim talking point has been picked up by many. On MSNBC, former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh said, “We’re at war, and this country got a stark reminder last week again that we’re at war… And not only should we take a pause, when it comes to our immigration, we need to begin profiling who our enemy is in this war: young Muslim men.”
