DEATH to Dzhokhar! So Sayeth the Jury!

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death by the jury in his Federal trial in Boston, Massachusetts, for the bombing attack by him and his older brother on the Boston Marathon two years ago. Dzhokhar was 19 at the time, now he’s 21. 

He was already convicted on all 30 counts, including 17 carrying the death penalty. The jury didn’t sentence him to death on all 17 death penalty convictions, just 6 of them.  They spent 14 hours deliberating on the sentence, and all 12 unanimously agreed. We are told that some were weeping.

Some media commentary has fatuously feigned surprise, because the State of Massachusetts has no death penalty and most people there oppose it. Of course this was a Federal trial, and any potential juror who opposed the death penalty was excluded from hearing the case. So I don’t see why there was anything surprising. And the judge acted as a hanging judge all along.

The defense conceded at the outset of the trial that Dzhokhar planted one of the two home-made pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the race. Yet the judge allowed weeks of inflammatory testimony by maimed survivors and tear-jerking evocations of those killed, including a child. As the facts of the bombing, the deaths, the injured (we’ve never been given an exact number of those- it was “over 200” and kept creeping up until now it’s at “over 260,” with a dozen I believe losing parts of their limbs) and Dzhokhar’s culpability were STIPULATED by his defense, there was NO EVIDENTIARY REASON to spend weeks pushing the gore and “horror” in the jurors’ faces. It was done to manipulate the jury’s emotions so they would impose death.

Three people were killed in the bombing. We are being subjected to more bathos- a LOT more bathos- over these three deaths than over the 2,100 or so Palestinians killed by Israel in its most recent assault on Gaza, the now estimated one million Iraqis dead as a result of the 2003 U.S. invasion, the 3 or 4 MILLION Vietnamese -and another million Laotians and Cambodians- killed by the U.S.- because actually there’s zero bathos, and zero genuine remorse or sympathy, for those victims in the U.S. media. The word of the day is “closure.” The local U.S. attorney, Carmen “I Drove Aaron Swartz to suicide!” Ortiz, has invoked it. The Mayor of Boston has invoked it. The New York Times has invoked it. The “hope” is that the victims will find “closure” in the execution of Tsarnaev. (If snuffing out his life is supposed to make them feel better, they’ll have to wait a number of years while his futile appeals run their course.)

I’m certainly not saying those three deaths aren’t a tragedy. I wish total strangers no ill as a general rule. I don’t believe they “deserved” to die simply for being Americans. But unfortunately there is a brutal and remorseless logic to the targeting of random Americans, given the American habit, centuries old, of slaughtering so many other people. How, really, can Americans squeal like stuck pigs when they’re on the receiving end of violence? They believe (at least most of them do) that their violence is righteous.

Nor do I share jihadist ideology or goals, as any regular reader of this blog has surely noticed.  And I wish that rather than target a relatively enlightened part of the U.S. like Boston, jihadist terrorists would pick more worthy targets. 

I simply refuse to hypocritically condemn some crimes and not other (far, FAR more major) ones.

As a political matter, I don’t think terrorist acts inside the U.S. do anything to improve things. They only empower the military and secret police state we already are suffocating under here. And materially they do nothing at all to weaken the U.S. The only benefit for the jihadists- and it is a major strategic one- is to provoke more repression, and more attacks on Muslims, which plays perfectly into the worldview the jihadists are trying to sell to the mass of Muslims, namely that “the West” is waging war on Islam, and the U.S. is an implacable enemy.

As for executing Tsarnaev, it strikes me as a tawdry act of vengeance. He comes across as an empty vessel, filled with jihadi notions by his domineering older brother (who was killed days after the bombing). It was explained that the jurors were supposedly put off by his lack of remorse. How he was supposed to show remorse in the courtroom isn’t explained. Should he have sobbed? (When defendants do that, it is often interpreted by jurors and judges as self-pity, anyway.) Ortiz felt the need to relitigate the point of whether he was controlled by his older brother as the defense unsuccessfully argued in trying to get the jury to spare his life. At her presentation to the media after the jury decision on death, she reargued the point gratuitously. [1]

The truth is, by all accounts he is a bit of a cipher, showing little emotion in general. A wasted life, now he is a pawn, a symbolic token to be ritually put to death to make a political point, namely that “terrorists,” that is, people who kill for the wrong political reasons, are the lowest of the low, utter scum to be gotten rid of.

Remember the deluge of vitriol heaped on Rolling Stone for running a cover with his picture on it? For some reason the picture was considered flattering, and Rolling Stone was said to be “glamorizing” Tsarnaev and making him “cool.” Even slight deviation from the ideological diktat that The Enemy must be demonized at all times results in attacks to whip the offenders back into line.

According to Ortiz, “today is not a day for political debate,” just “reflection.” Okay Carmen, here’s some reflections from me. Let me know when we’re allowed to “debate” the endless “war on terrorism” and other political topics.

That damn Rolling Stone, glamorizing Tsarnaev by calling him a "Monster!"...Oh wait, "monster is BAD, right?

Pretty Vacant

Surrendering to police after they tried and failed to kill him. This time they'll get it right.

1] "U.S.Attorney Carmen Ortiz speaks after death penalty decision, May 15, 2015.” Ortiz raised the matter of the dead university cop (the jurors didn’t sentence him to death for that), the fact that children were killed (I think just one), the “weapons of mass destruction.” If a home-made bomb made out of a kitchen pressure cooker is a “weapon of mass destruction,” I wonder what the cluster bombs the U.S. drops on civilians, and gives to Israel to drop on Palestinians and Lebanese, and sells to Saudi Arabia which is killing Yemeni civilians with, are. Or a 30,000 pound “bunker buster” bomb. Or nuclear weapons. It seems like a hysterical exaggeration to call this a “weapon of mass destruction.”

But these days the U.S. classifies just about anything as a “weapon of mass destruction” if a “terrorist” holds it. 

As for the heinousness of killing children, American apparatchiks defend it when they do it, or Israel or others they back do it. Even the cold-blooded murder of four young Palestinian boys playing soccer on a Gaza beach, blown up by an Israeli gunboat as they ran for their lives, is swept under the rug. (NBC immediately pulled its eyewitness reporter out of Gaza to shut him down.) The point isn’t that it’s okay to blow up kids in America. The point is the insufferable, monumental hypocrisy of the American power establishment. Over its two centuries of existence, the U.S. has killed quite a few children, and doesn’t show any sign of stopping. The self-righteousness of these apparatchiks is rather nauseating.

Ortiz also stressed that the death penalty was imperative because Tsarnaev had tried to "coerce and intimidate the United States." Well, Honey, if the U.S. scares that easily, maybe it should just curl up into a ball and suck its thumb. The Soviet Union had 20,000 nuclear weapons, but two homemade bombs in what amounts to small buckets is a mortal threat to the United States? 

I guess the message is Don't Mess With The U.S.! That should deter all the Islamic zealots who seek martyrdom.