The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
NOTE: James Taranto is traveling today. The excerpt below is from the May 5 BOTW archives.
We May Have a Clue
Although a suspect, Faisal Shahzad, is in custody in Saturday’s attempted car bombing in midtown Manhattan, the Associated Press reports the case is still shrouded in mystery: “Authorities said they had shed little light on what might have motivated him.”
Hmm, this is a head-scratcher all right. One possible clue appears in another AP dispatch:
Shahzad’s behavior sometimes seemed odd to his neighbors, and he surprised a real estate broker he hardly knew with his outspokenness about President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.
“He mentioned that he didn’t like Bush policies in Iraq,” said Igor Djuric, who represented Shahzad in 2004 when he was buying a home.
Djuric said he couldn’t remember the exact words Shahzad used about Bush but “something to the effect of he doesn’t know what he’s doing and it’s the wrong thing that he’s doing.”
“I don’t know if he mentioned 9/11,” Djuric said, “but something like that, Iraq has nothing to do with anything.”
As we noted Monday, President Obama warned just hours before the bomb attempt that, as yet another AP dispatch put it, “partisan rants and name-calling under the guise of legitimate discourse pose a serious danger to America’s democracy, and may incite ‘extreme elements’ to violence.”
It may be the Shahzad was influenced by partisan rants such as Michael Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 9/11” or a speech on Iraq by a certain Illinois state senator:
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income–to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
The AP also notes that investigators say Shahzad “traveled to the lawless Waziristan region” of his native Pakistan, where he “learned bomb making at a terrorist training camp.” It has been our observation that there is at least a correlation between terrorism emanating from that part of the world and extreme religious views. The authorities may want to look into the possibility of some sort of theological motivation.
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