“The note — scrawled with a marker on the interior wall of the cabin — said the bombings were retribution for U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims “collateral damage” in the same way Muslims have been in the American-led wars. “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” Tsarnaev wrote.”
Running Chicken: Courage, Cowardice and Terrorism
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, Bill Maher got himself into a great deal of hot water by opining that terrorists who flew planes into buildings might be called a great many things but “cowards” shouldn’t be one of them.
We might well disagree with Maher, thinking about a definition of cowardice that doesn’t turn entirely on someone’s actions. In that case, we could claim that even someone who risks or gives up his life for a cause is still a coward insofar as his tactics are cowardly or his targets suggest cowardice. Someone who attacks the weak or helpless, for example, very well might be deemed a coward even if he does something that, in another situation, might seem courageous.
All of this came to mind when I watched the coverage of the Boston bombings a couple of weeks ago and when I got the following question from a student:
I’m interested in the fact that terrorists and criminals are consistently referred to as “cowards.” Obviously, the actions of such people are the opposite of heroic, but does this mean these people are not courageous?
The crucial difference between the 9/11 terrorists and the Tsarnaevs is that there wasn’t anything at all courageous to point to in Boston in the way that Maher could point to the courage of the 9/11 terrorists who gave up their own lives in the pursuit of their murderous ideology.
In Boston, the bombers indiscriminately attacked people who were helpless and unaware, and they did so in a way that, at least in the moment, presented no risk to themselves. They set down explosive devices on a sidewalk full of innocent people and they walked away from them.
There’s no doubt that this is cowardice.
That said, I think it’s fairly straightforward to make the argument that terrorism is always cowardly, even if particular terrorists take actions that might appear courageous under different circumstances. The circumstances matter a whole lot.
For a very interesting discussion of courage in political theory, I highly recommend Richard Avramenko’s book Courage: The Politics of Life and Limb.
“A policeman sacrificed his life for the sake of others, embracing a suicide bomber in southeast Afghanistan on Saturday morning to dull the blast as it detonated, eyewitnesses said.”
“A woman and her brother have appeared in a French court after a three-year-old child named Jihad was sent to school wearing a T-shirt with the words “I am a bomb” inscribed on the front, and the words “Jihad, born September 11” printed on the back.”
Jihad Boy Wears 9/11 Bomb T-Shirt To School
More Americans are killed in gun deaths each year than all the deaths in terrorist attacks worldwide every year
T-Shirt sold in NYC right after 1993 terrorist attack
California men arrested in alleged terror plot
Four Southern California men have been charged with plotting to kill Americans overseas and in the United States by joining al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, federal officials said Monday.
The defendants were arrested for plotting to bomb government facilities and public places after federal authorities uncovered their plans to engage in “violent jihad,” FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said.
@BarackObama
Then-CNN (now ABC News) correspondent Christiane Amanpour correctly predicted that Osama bin Laden was hiding in a villa inside Pakistan in an October 2008 taping of the HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher.” [HBO]
(via brooklynmutt)
“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” … Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.
That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.”
The Bush White House Was Deaf to 9/11 Warnings - NYTimes
Navy Seal’s Book Will Describe Raid That Killed Bin Laden
Read: NYTimes
“Anyone who helps the Mujahideen find the whereabouts of Obama and Hillary Clinton will be rewarded with 10 Camels to the information leading to Obama and 10 hens and 10 cocks for Hillary,” said senior Shabaab commander Fuad Mohamed Khalaf in a statement reported on numerous websites.”
“We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.”
The Piece of Paper That Killed Bin Laden
If you can manage to decipher Leon Panetta’s chicken scratch, you too can read the final memo that launched the raid that killed America’s most hated enemy. The memo is part of Peter Bergen’s Time cover story on Osama bin Laden’s last days and Obama’s call to go ahead, despite Joe Biden and Robert Gates’ disapproval, with the Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s Abottabad complex.
Read: The Atlantic Wire
