Jihad Abhors a Vacuum

In his Garden of Allah afterlife, he gets his own private hell: his rendezvous with the virgins. m/r

Jihad Abhors a Vacuum :: SteynOnline
National Review's Happy Warrior
May 22, 2013

Post-9/11, we in the omniscient pundit class were all Afghan experts. Post-Boston, we are all Chechen experts.
Strictly between us, I can count what I know about Chechens on one leg. A couple of years ago, while I was in Copenhagen picking up an award from the Danish Free Press Society, a one-legged Chechen prematurely self-detonated in the Hotel Jørgensen while assembling a bomb. His device, using the same highly volatile TATP as in the London Tube bombings, was intended for my friends at Jyllands-Posten, publishers of the famous Mohammed cartoons, to whom I chanced to be giving an interview. All things considered, I'm glad the poor fellow pre-activated in his hotel room rather than delivering his package in the midst of my photo shoot. His name was Lors Doukaiev, and he had traveled from his home in Liège, Belgium, in order to protest the Mohammed cartoons by exploding a bomb on September 11. Got that? A citizen of Belgium is blowing up a newspaper in Denmark on the anniversary of a terrorist attack on America.

So whatever was bugging him didn't have a lot to do with Chechnya. In Boston, before he was run over by his brother and found himself committing the jihadist faux pas of greeting his 72 virgins with tire tracks from head to toe, young Tamerlan Tsarnaev had apparently put on his Amazon wish-list the book The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule. Yet while the Chechen-nationalist struggle has certainly become more Islamic in the last two decades, it's a bit of a mystery what it has to do with Jutland newspapers and Massachusetts marathons. Lors Doukaiev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were young men in their mid twenties who had lived in the West for much of their lives. Both were boxers. Aside from the fact that Lors was one-legged and Tamerlan wasn't, the quotes their friends and neighbors offered in the wake of their sudden notoriety are more or less interchangeable: "He was perfectly integrated. He was jovial and very open." That was Fabian Detaille, young Doukaiev's trainer at the Cocktail Boxing Club in Droixhe, speaking to Belgian radio, but it could just as easily have been one of Tamerlan's boxing buddies on NPR in Boston.

The Washington Post covered much of the Tsarnaev narrative under the headline "A Faded Portrait of an Immigrant's American Dream." The story is about what you'd expect from the headline but the "faded portrait" is fascinating — a photograph of the family before they came to America: young Mr. and Mrs. Tsarnaev with baby Tamerlan, and Uncle Muhamad with a Tom Selleck moustache and Soviet military uniform. If you only know Ma Tsarnaeva from her post-Boston press conferences as a head-scarfed harpie glorying in her sons' martyrdom and boasting that she'll be shrieking "Allahu akbar!" when the Great Satan takes her out too, the "faded portrait" is well worth your time: Back then, just before the U.S.S.R. fell apart, the jihadist crone looked like a mildly pastier version of an Eighties rock chick — a passable Dagestan doppelgänger for Joan Jett, with spiky black hair and kohl-ringed eyes. She loves rock 'n' roll, so put another ruble in the jukebox, baby!

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