terrorism
Boston, between Columbine and 9/11
President Obama declared that the “hateful agenda” of the Boston bombers will not succeed. But he also warns us not to jump to conclusions. Thus we may ask, what if there was no agenda? What if the Tsarnaev brothers are not ideologically motivated Islamic terrorists but deluded young men, just like the killers of Columbine,…
NYC Event: The World 9/11 Created
Voice of Witness, the non-profit arm of McSweeney’s Books, has put together their latest collection of oral histories in time to be included in our reflections on 9/11 and the world that day created. On Tuesday, September 13, Buddha-killer Scott Korb welcomes Alia Malek, editor of VoW’s Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice, to the Jerry…
I Wanna Be Like Osama b.
A clever little artifact of our depressing times: It comes from Jihad! The Musical, written by Benjamin Scheuer, who introduced himself at the Tin Anniversary Spectacular the other night.
That’s Irish Evangelism
1972: Secret IRA priest is protected from prosecution in car bomb attack— Martin Scorsese! cue up “Gimme Shelter” http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67N23820100824
Ground Zero for American Islam
A few weeks ago, we were all talking about race. An event—the accidental firing of Shirley Sherrod, a USDA employee—set off one of those “national conversations”: a spurious debate driven by a cable chatter, rising incessantly until the next blip arrives. The conversations are then capped off by one, maybe two, Times columnists. Now we’ve…
Independence Day, almost
This one day during basic training when we did a night live fire exercise crawling under exploding things made me kind of done with fireworks. I was low-crawling through the sand with tracer bullets flying overhead (“Don’t stand up, or you might get killed,” they told us, though I figured the bullets were probably higher…
Explosions in Mumbai
A year ago today ten men in jeans and black t-shirts took ten minutes to hijack Mumbai, a cosmopolitan city that everyone here in India compares to New York. With guns and grenades and bombs in backpacks, they killed 164 people and left the city in flames. Most of the attackers were killed in the…
30 Seconds of Book Criticism: Inside the Kingdom
Publishers send me books to consider for review, but I rarely end up writing about even those that interest me. So, after culling the trash and the irrelevant and the brilliant-but-not-compelling-to-me volumes and dispatching them to the Monroe County Public Library, Honeoye Falls branch, I stack up the rest. The stack grows, until it teeters;…
This Progamming Brought to You by the F.B.I.
There’s little question that the four men arrested for plotting a series of terror attacks north of New York City are creeps. One’s a purse snatcher who collects urine. Another boasts of being willing to murder to save $700. One dealt drugs behind a school. Not much is available on the fourth man, besides the…
Hermaphrodite Terrorist Angel
How many holy rollers does it take to pray the devil out of a hermaphrodite terrorist angel?
