American Muslims on edge in wake of Boston attacks

NEW YORK – “How could they do this? For what? For the sake of what?” an incredulous Maret Tsarnaeva, the aunt of suspected Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, demanded from journalists in the lobby of her Toronto apartment building on Friday.

That question has been foremost on the minds of most Americans in the 24 hours since the FBI released its first blurry photographs of the two men it suspected are responsible for the three deaths and scores of wounded in the Monday bombing — not to mention, by Friday, the murder of an MIT police officer, the injury of a transit officer, and the lockdown of a major American city.

“Do you think they were radicalized?” a journalist asked another family member, uncle Ruslan Tsarni, on Thursday.

“Most likely somebody radicalized them,” Tsarni replied. Asked why they might commit such a crime, Tsarni said they were “losers… Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it’s a fraud, it’s a fake.”

It is that connection, the growing suspicion that the brothers were motivated by radical Islam, that added an extra layer of horror for one group of Americans glued to their televisions watching updates from Friday’s manhunt.

“They’re more than losers, they’re murderers,” said Eboo Patel, a prominent Muslim-American author who runs a Chicago-based interfaith group.

“I don’t feel like my faith has been maligned at all, because I don’t consider these two kids Muslims,” Patel told the Times of Israel on Friday. “I don’t consider people who wantonly kill innocent human beings as part of any faith or ethical tradition. The murderers of all traditions belong to one tradition, the tradition of murderers.”

Patel said he believed Americans were capable of distinguishing between their Muslim neighbors and murderers who claim Islam as their cause.

“I have a lot of faith in my fellow countrymen that they can distinguish [between the two]. I think there are small segments of the American population who are invested in connecting Muslims and violence, and they will make much of this. But the breadth of the American population is able to distinguish murderous individuals from various identity communities that they think they belong to,” Patel said.

“There’s a lot of anger at the attack itself because of the obvious reasons – the loss of human life and the senseless nature of such an attack,” Nasser Weddady, Boston-based Director of Outreach for the American Islamic Congress, told PRI’s The World on Tuesday.

But many Muslims were also frustrated at being associated with such atrocities, Weddady said. “We Muslims and Arabs don’t have to—every time that somebody does something criminal, why do we all collectively have to take the blame or explain ourselves once again?”

There is nothing new in the association, of course. Even Sikhs and Christians from the Middle East have faced blowback, discrimination, and occasionally even revenge attacks in response to terror attacks or fears born of simple anti-Muslim prejudice.

“I personally was detained right after 9/11 because somebody was too afraid of the sight of what was termed then a bunch of Middle Eastern-looking men congregating in an apartment,” Weddady recalled.

But there is one sense in which the Boston Marathon bombing may be worse than 9/11, at least for American Muslims and other minorities.

The 2001 attacks saw the murder of thousands and the toppling of two iconic buildings in the heart of an American cultural and financial center. But they were also perpetrated by complete foreigners, trained soldiers driven by ideology and engaged in a war against Western civilization itself. They were too foreign to be easily associated with the local, integrated Muslim communities one encounters in any American city.

Not so the Boston bombers.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a naturalized American citizen (his brother, Tamerlan, was reportedly denied citizenship because of a domestic violence charge). The photographic evidence and testimonies spilling out into the media over the past day showed the lives of individuals who seem to have integrated completely into American society. Ahdi Moro, a friend of the brothers, called Dzhokhar “the most popular kid in school.” (https://soundcloud.com/wbur/ahdi-moro-friend-of-the) Robin Young, an NPR radio host, said she had met one of the brothers, who “seemed like such a nice young man.”

One photograph shown constantly on the television news reports over the past 24 hours shows a smiling, muscular Tamerlan training – or rather, showing off – in front of a young woman at Boston’s Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts center, hardly an image associated with the pieties of the Islamist terrorist. In another photograph he is seen smiling broadly and accepting a boxing trophy.

The dissonance was driven home even more acutely through a photograph posted to Twitter by Robin Young that showed Dzhokhar standing alongside her nephew at their high school graduation. (https://twitter.com/hereandnowrobin/status/325243346043936770) “My beloved nephew on right, djohar tsarnaev on left, happy cambridge Rindge and Latin grads. heartbreaking,” she wrote in the tweet.

What was heartbreaking, and for some terrifying, was the sense that the murderers were ordinary folk, promising, popular young men living in an ordinary American neighborhood, high school athletes with the aspiration, according to their social media accounts, to make money.

A Facebook graphic shared widely among Muslim Americans this week shows a white t-shirt that reads in large black letters, “Muslim,” with a small-type “disclaimer” underneath: “1. I am not a member of a terrorist group. 2. I love my mom, apple pie, and America. 3. I didn’t do whatever it was.”

It isn’t hard to distinguish between an ordinary Muslim American and the terrorist of the American public imagination, the turbaned Taliban fighter or extremist preacher. But what happens when the media is flooded with images that seem to conflate the two, with a 19-year-old repeatedly called “sweet” or “unassuming” or “polite” by reporters — who commits, possibly in the name of Islam, heinous acts of mass murder?

Boston’s Muslim community was, of course, more worried about being targeted by the terrorist still on the run from police until Friday night than about being associated with him.

“Let’s be clear here,” Bostonian Weddady said. The fear of an anti-Muslim backlash “is nothing compared to the suffering of the families of the victims and the victims themselves because [of] what happened [on Monday]… This was a terrorist attack and this was an attack on my city, on our city, on our citizens.”

But the concern is palpable. Boston’s Imam Ibrahim Rahim told ABC News that in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, after praying for the victims he added, “Dear Lord, God, please whatever this yields, let it not be something that can in anyway be associated with Islam.”

The Tsarnaevs can not only be associated with Islam, they have already been associated in multiple news cycles and countless media reports with Boston’s own Muslim community.

Were the Tsarnaevs radicalized, perhaps through online contacts with foreign groups? We don’t yet know. But every American already possesses a few poignant facts – that a friendly high school wrestler, apparently well-adjusted and popular, a Muslim neighbor his acquaintances remember fondly, transformed without warning into a mass murderer.

The Tsarnaevs brought “shame” on their family, their uncle said. Their crime brought something even worse on America’s Muslim community – an image, however fleeting or misleading, of ordinary American Muslims turned terrorists.