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Here is our analysis of pop-culture anti-American pro-terrorism at the
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stoned:
from Guevara to Tsarnaev
by Charles Jacobs and Ilya
Feoktistov
August 2, 2013 The Jewish
Advocate
The
Rolling Stone cover glamorizing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should not have
surprised.
The
cultural left was born hating American power and blaming it for the poverty and
oppression of indigenous, darker-skinned Third Worlders who naturally and
justifiably hate us. Expressing admiration for violent anti- Americans has for a
long time been a way for the disaffected to exclaim how much they are not like
the white imperialists they live among, how – unlike us – they are noble souls,
standing with the oppressed.
In his
masterful book, “Bobos in Paradise,” New York Times columnist David Brooks
explained how therapeutic this sort of thing can be for middle-class youth who
find themselves living off the wealth of their parents, and Western capitalism
in general – a wealth they sense is undeserved, a wealth they feel traps them in
an immorally privileged corner.
We
should have some sympathy: It is a good thing that our children, swathed
in affluence unknown to the common man just decades ago, feel moral twinges when
they see the lives of Third Worlders. The problem is that the children of the
West have been misled about how wealth is created. Historians know that specific
cultural attributes combined with specific economic policies to create the
West’s cornucopia. Today’s children are not taught that “the Protestant work
ethic” and free markets lifted the West out of age-old poverty, or that hard
work, deferred gratification, investment, and free trade are part of an
interconnected system that can’t help but produce massive wealth. Yes, the same
capitalism that lifted all boats did not bestow its gifts equally. And yes, raw
capitalism produces hardships that can and should be alleviated through safety
nets. But the simpler lesson taught by the left – whose “long march” through our
cultural intuitions won the day – is that our wealth is to blame for others’
poverty. In the ’60s, the young victims of leftist fallacies cried out against
their “white-skin privilege,” tried to join the Black Panthers, and cheered the
Viet Cong. This has old, known and even pre-political roots. Ever since Jean
Jacques Rousseau cursed the emerging, artificially sophisticated, modern city
life and contrasted it with the purer, nobler bygone days of agrarian society,
much of the Western middle class developed a romance with the “unspoiled
primitive,” a vision Rousseau captured in his description of “the noble savage.”
Artists such as Gauguin went to live with and glorify the natives.
Anthropologists studied the Trobriand Islanders, seeking the secrets of our lost
natures.
The “Guerrillero
Herico” photograph of Che Guevara has become so popular it’s been printed on
T-shirts. Political anti-Westernism emerged with the socialist critique of
capitalism, and was dramatically expressed by those who romanticized
bomb-throwing anarchists and later, with even more passion, communist
guerrillas. Western infatuation with “anti-materialist” rebels reached a
pinnacle with the mad love-crush over Che Guevara, a child of the middle class
himself who revolted, became the Cuban communist terrorist “guerrilla fighter,”
and sought to create the “new man” who would live for moral and not material
goals. Che achieved rock-star hero status among the West’s spoiled children who
didn’t actually have to give up any of their privileges, but just wear his
T-shirt and sing from his songbook. His image was made iconic: Alberto Korda’s
photograph of him entitled “Guerrillero Herico” (“Heroic Guerrilla Fighter”) is
thought to be the most famous photograph in the world. It’s worn as a flag on
the chests of the rich kids whose T-shirts shriek hatred for their own “greedy”
kind and for the riches their parents’ society bestowed upon them, trapping them
in white guilt.
Communist
“guerrillas” are a bit passé. The left failed to recruit the “proletariat” for
its revolution – the working class preferred scarfing up capitalist goods at
Wal-Mart over programs to transform themselves into the “new man.” But ever
resourceful, leftists adopted the Arab/Muslim “masses” as a new force to defeat
the capitalists. And so today, radical leftists fetishize Islamic
terrorists.
This is
not new: Americans were surprised to see leftist Tsarnaev supporters flying in
from as far as Washington State to protest outside court during his arraignment.
But Boston leftists have been developing crushes on Islamists for quite a while
Indeed Dzhokhar is the third Islamist terrorist that Boston’s radicals have
sought to turn into celebrities.
The
first was Tarek Mehanna, accused of plotting to use a machine gun to kill
shoppers at the Attleboro shopping mall and convicted of material support for
al-Qaida. Mehanna was given this year’s Sacco and Vanzetti award from the
leftist Community Church of Boston, based in the Trinity Church in Copley Square
– just feet away from where the Marathon bombs killed three people and maimed
scores more.
“Occupy
Boston” has also endorsed Mehanna’s cause. There is a video of an “Occupy
Boston” spokesman telling the crowd at a rally in Boston Common: “I believe that
Tarek is innocent of any wrongdoing. …Tarek is an Egyptian American who
empowered his community – an oppressed community, the Muslim community, speaking
against U.S. wars in the Middle East. He represents, in that sense, a link in
the chain of international solidarity against this global system that has
oppressed so many of us.” He concluded by saying: “At the end of the day, we are
all Tarek Mehanna.” There was even a Tarek “flash mob” performance on the
streets of Cambridge, replete with 60’s-looking radical women with hairy
armpits. “Tarek” iconography – on websites and posters – preceded
Dzhokhar’s.
Shortly
after Boston’s radical leftists adopted Mehanna, they learned to love Aafia
Siddiqui, an MIT- and Brandeis-educated – and then radicalized – young Muslim
woman who is now serving an 86-year sentence for attempting to murder two FBI
agents. She was caught in Afghanistan with planning a chemical attack in
downtown Manhattan. The Cambridge Public Library hosted an event called “Free
Sister Aafia.”The “Occupy Boston” crowd carried signs saying “Free Aafia and
Tarek.”
While
the far left openly salivates over anti-Western killers and would-be killers,
the liberal leaders in Boston, working to blind us to the roots of these
threats, work publicly with Islamic extremists who openly call for Mehanna and
Siddiqui’s release. Ten years ago, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who now
eloquently accuses Rolling Stone of “reward[ing] a terrorist with celebrity
treatment” rewarded the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) – the mosque attended by
Mehanna, Siddiqui and the two Boston Marathon bombers – with a $2 million plot
of city land (which he gave away for peanuts) for the building of a new $16
million, Saudi-funded mega-mosque. Just two years ago, “Menino’s mosque” (as The
Boston Phoenix called it) hosted a pep rally for four convicted Muslim
terrorists from around the country.
Shortly
before that, Governor Deval Patrick – who has also condemned the Rolling Stone
cover as being in poor taste – attended a high-profile event at the same mosque,
where he literally embraced one of Boston’s most extremist imams, Abdullah
Faaruuq. Faaruuq, who has made the cases of Mehanna and Siddiqui, causes
célèbres among the Islamic Society of Boston worshippers. (Faaruuq was dismissed
from his position as the Muslim chaplain at Northeastern University when this
was revealed.) Even Henrietta Davis, the mayor of Cambridge – where the Marathon
terrorists lived – is inadvertently supporting radicals. She headlined an event
in support of the ISB, where she can be seen staring in dutiful rapture as the
“moderate” spokesman from the mosque that the bombers prayed in – Anwar Kazmi –
spouts platitudes about peace and justice after the bombing. She has not
responded to reports that a year earlier, Kazmi was caught on film leading a
Boston Common rally at which he called on Muslims and leftists to support
Mehanna and Siddiqui.
Will
Tsarnaev’s stylized visage become like Che’s, a global countercultural symbol of
“rebellion,” an international insignia for the popculture leftists? State police
Sgt. Sean Murphy might have thrown a monkey wrench into the leftist icon machine
by releasing to the press an unglamorous set of photos of Tsarnaev taken as he
was arrested, bruised and bloodied and in the unheroic pose of abject
surrender.
Murphy,
who was docked a day’s pay for his valiant service to Western civilization, gets
our vote as the real “new man.” Maybe we should take up a collection; he
certainly earned his keep that day. Stay tuned.
Charles Jacobs
and Ilya Feoktistov are President and Research Director, respectively, of
Americans for Peace and Tolerance (www.peaceandtolerance.com.
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