Why the faith of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects doesn’t matter, but yours does

[Mango40]

20. Proving a Conservative Caricature of Boston Bombing Coverage Wrong

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/proving-a-conservative-caricature-of-boston-bombing-coverage-wrong/275293/

The Conservative Media Were Wrong

"The slug at the top of the page online: "Bombing Suspect Cites Islamic Extremist Beliefs As Motive." The lede:

The portrait investigators have begun to piece together of the two brothers suspected of the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that they were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but were not acting with known terrorist groups -- and that they may have learned to build bombs simply by logging onto the online English-language magazine of the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Yemen, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

This is an undeniable instance of a "mainstream media" outlet explicitly tying the bombing to Islamic extremism. Now look at how Mark Steyn invokes that same NYT article at National Review's group blog.

Here's the whole post:

Former brother-in-law Elmirza Khozhugov explains Tamerlan Tsarnaev's grievances to the New York Times:

He was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.

So he blew up an eight-year old boy and a couple of hundred other Americans.

And now the media are full of stories about how the Tsarnaevs were all-American kids and "beautiful, beautiful boys" and maybe it was the boxing or the Ben Affleck movies or the classical music but, whatever it was, it was nothing to do with Islam. Nothing whatever. So I guess it worked."