The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Shortest Books Ever Written
“Inside the Mind of Kim Jong-Un”–headline, Sydney Morning Herald, April 15
Longest Books Ever Written
“Why I Fled North Korea”–headline, CNN.com, April 14
Annals of Bad Timing
A few disconnected observations on the horrific bombings in Boston. First, the New York Times has really bad timing. The same day as the bombings, it ran an op-ed piece by a Guantanamo Bay detainee. It’s reminiscent of the puff piece the Times ran about domestic terrorist (and former future-presidential pal) Bill Ayers, whose headline began “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.” That story appeared Sept. 11, 2001. At least the Gitmo guy denies being involved with terrorism.
By necessity, a story like the Boston Marathon bombing–a sudden and shocking event whose explanation becomes clear only slowly–gives rise to a lot of speculation. These three paragraphs in a Christian Science Monitor story illustrate the point:
The fact that the target was an event of great significance to Boston but not particularly significant to the wider world could indicate that the bomber was a local or at least a native of the United States. The explosions occurred on April 15, tax day, which could be a further indication of a domestic connection.
But the bombs were not directed against a government building or institution, which is often a hallmark of disaffected, lone-wolf domestic terrorists, noted some terrorism analysts. And the style of the attack, in which one explosion was closely followed by another, mimics that used by numerous groups in the Middle East.
One government official told the Los Angeles Times that his guess would be “self-radicalized Islamic extremists from the area.”
The only factual content in this passage is the location and date of the bombing.
The leftist site AlterNet ran a piece with the headline “Boston Bombing Is a Tragedy, But Let’s Not Rush to Blame Muslims or People of Arab Descent.” A fair enough point, and the Saudi student police were questioning turned out to be a witness, not a suspect. But the AlterNet subheadline is a puzzler: “It’s normal to be scared, but it’s worth recalling what happened after 9/11.” The piece never gets around to telling us “what happened after 9/11,” but our best recollection is that that attack did turn out to have been perpetrated by Arab Muslims.
National Journal’s Ron Fournier has another odd comparison, in a piece titled “Why Boston Bombings Might Be Scarier Than 9/11”:
You might say it’s unfair to compare Boston’s relatively low death toll to 9/11 and Oklahoma City, much less to the thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the daily total of gun deaths on U.S. streets.
But the Boston attack is notable not for the number of deaths, but for its social significance. It’s one thing–a dastardly, evil thing–to strike symbols of economic and military power. It’s another to hit the heart of America. Death at the finish line in Boston makes every place (and everybody) less secure. . . .
From the nation’s founding, America has had two sharply delineated lives: one public and one private. The latter is meant to be safe and sacrosanct, part of what Thomas Jefferson called “the pursuit of Happiness.” The public life is rowdy and partisan, even violent as reflected in the Civil War. “What happened in Boston,” said Meg Mott, professor of politics at Marlboro College in Vermont, “is that the private life got blown up and hit deep in the heart of our bifurcated American lives. The lines were blurred, and that’s scary.”
We don’t think Fournier’s distinction holds up. Granted, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were primarily workplaces (although the former also housed the Windows on the World Restaurant). But some of the passengers on the airplanes surely were traveling recreationally, and some of them were children, including Christine Hanson, whom blogger James Lileks memorialized in September 2002:
Little Christine was Gnat’s [Lileks’s daughter’s nickname] age, give or take a month; bin Laden’s lackeys killed her–and did so to ensure that other fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters died as well, preferably by the tens of thousands. This little girl’s death wasn’t even a comma in the manifesto they hoped to write. They made sure that her last moments alive were filled with horror and blood, screams and fear; they made sure that the last thing she saw was the desperate faces of her parents, insisting that everything was okay, we’re going to see Mickey, holding out a favorite toy with numb hands, making up a happy lie. And then she was fire and then she was ash.
As for Oklahoma City, 19 of the 168 people Timothy McVeigh murdered there were children. Fifteen of them were at a day-care center. The idea that those earlier attacks didn’t implicate “private life” could hardly be more fatuous.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
