An Algerian-American from Cambridge was attacked outside a Back Bay restaurant Saturday night, say police and a Muslim advocacy group,the latest of several assaults on Muslims since the ­Boston Marathon bombings three weeks ago.

The assailants allegedly called the 23-year-old college student, Amine Hadjeres, a “terrorist” and told him he looked like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects accused of planting bombs at the Marathon finish line on April 15, who was later killed while trying to elude police.

The victim, a US citizen, said he was attacked by two tipsy men outside the Cafeteria Boston restaurant on Newbury Street in Boston about 10 p.m. Saturday night after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Hadjeres said he initially tried to ignore the men, who taunted and shoved him, but wound up brawling with them in the street after they would not leave him alone. He said the fight left him with bloody knuckles and a bruised elbow and hip, but he successfully fought off both men and walked back into the restaurant, where he was greeted with applause.

“They messed with the wrong dude,” Hadjeres said. “Their faces were pretty banged up.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advo­cacy organization, urged state and federal authorities to charge suspects with violating hate crime laws.

“We urge local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to take the suspects in this case into custody and to bring appropriate charges that reflect the apparent bias motive,” said council spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.

Police told the council the suspects have been identified, but not yet arrested.

“Dude You Have No Quran” AUTOTUNE REMIX

Jacob Isom rescues a Quran before it can be burned. Dude, you have no Quran!

If you have not seen the original check it out here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2-KgBhslBQ

In these days of renewed Islamophobia in the wake of the Boston bombings, I would like to salute Jacob Isom, the man who snatched the political momentum from one bigoted group in Florida several years ago and made all anti-racists proud.

Wow. Watch the video. This racist bigot is an owner of a company that sells airplanes. He’s not the “ignorant white trash redneck” that the media pretends is the SOURCE of bigotry in this country. Rather, he is an educated businessman. He is an American capitalist. And he is a violent, savage, racist piece of shit who probably has a lot of influence (for $ = influence in America) with politicians, media, etc., in his community …

===

An Army reservist and Iraq veteran who works as a cabdriver says a passenger he picked up early Friday at a Northern Virginia country club accused him of being a terrorist because he is Muslim, then fractured his jaw in an attack being described by Islamic activists as a hate crime.

Mohamed A. Salim says the passenger compared him to the men accused of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing 11 days earlier and threatened to kill him.

“Because I’m a Muslim, he treated me like a piece of trash,” Salim said. “I love this country. I didn’t deserve this.”

Ed Dahlberg of Clifton, who has been charged with misdemeanor assault, denied hitting Salim in a statement released by his attorney.

Muslim rights workers said Salim’s account is supported by medical records and an 11-minute, obscenity-filled video of Dahlberg’s remarks leading up to the alleged assault. Salim, a 39-year-old from Great Falls, provided The Washington Post with a copy, which his attorney described as evidence of the prejudice that others sometimes face but rarely document.

brofiling:

white privilege radically changes the appearance of Tsarnaev bros

This is how brofiling actually works in real life. The Week Magazine ran with this image as their cover sketch.

Just so it is said, clearly and unambiguously: the Tsarnaev brothers are white guys. They are white. The FBI’s own wanted poster for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lists his race as “white”, but you would never know it from the cover image on The Week.

Hold up the cover to someone else, and ask them how many white people they can see on the cover. Chances are they will identify Gabby Giffords on the top left and the image of the Boston policemen (all white men) on the top right, but how about those two guys in the center? Nope, not a chance that anyone would say these caricatures look white.

Why? Because in addition to being white they are also “Muslim”, which is the current dehumanizing “Other” that whiteness has constructed as a sanctioned target for violence in US popular culture.

This is how white privilege works in media representations and everyday life: when the criminal suspects are demonstrably white men, seize upon any aspect of difference and magnify it such that they become Othered, non-white, and menacing. If it is too hard to do so, simply dismiss them as aberrations and isolated cases of insanity. This is also how white culture, specifically the process of whiteness in conjunction with white privilege, portrays several non-white identities, including those that are now considered white but at one time were decidedly not so. For example, see here for how the Irish were depicted as violent apes or lazy drunks in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

===

how the media creates perceptions of race and “whiteness.” also, i wouldn’t necessarily say that “white privilege” changed the appearance of the Tsarnaev brothers, but rather simply white racism.

The Times article “A Battered Dream for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Then a Violent Path” is heartbreaking but also does a tremendous service by explaining - not excusing, but explaining – how he arrived at bombing the Boston Marathon on Patriot’s Day, killing three and injuring more than 200. People should read the article and I’m not going to rehash it. But I do want to explore its examination of how much immigrant aspiration Tsarnaev put into boxing and how the sports establishment in the post 9/11 era responded by pushing him away.

 … In most descriptions of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he’s described as a “one-time boxer.” That doesn’t quite tell the story. Tsarnaev was a two-time New England Golden Gloves Heavyweight Champion. This was a flamboyant showman of a fighter wearing white leather, furs, and incorporating “showy gymnastics into his training and fighting, walking on his hands, falling into splits, tumbling into corners.” The religious ascetic would emerge later. At this point Tsarnaev was WWE flair with Donald Trump attitude. He was America as learned through a television screen. But also, like the America of his dreams, his ambitions were as large as his attitude.

A high school classmate in Cambridge, Luis Vasquez, said to The New York Times, “The view on him was that he was a boxer and you would not want to mess with him. He told me that he wanted to represent the U.S. in boxing. He wanted to do the Olympics and then turn pro.”

The next step was to compete in the National Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions. There was, however, one problem: the esteemed boxing organization had changed their rules for admittance. The Golden Gloves, at the height of Tsarnaev’s powers as a fighter, ceased its long-standing practice of allowing legally documented immigrants to take part in their Tournament of Champions. This broke with the history of a competition that was started in 1923 by sports editor Arch Ward in a hardscrabble town defined by immigration: the “stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders” otherwise known as Chicago. That meant Tsarnaev and three other New England champions – all immigrants - were not allowed to compete. It’s only at this point that he quit the sport. As The New York Times reported,

“Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge, Mass., to Dagestan showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.”

Adrift meant eking out an existence on food stamps, and his wife’s $1,200 a month job. Adrift meant unemployment, as he was needed to stay home and watch their infant daughter. Adrift meant feeling a new sense of belonging in political and religious doctrine that spoke of war against United States. Adrift meant fury at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but no means to channel that anger in a way that didn’t reflect his despair. The New York Times article covers all of this in depth. I would add though that his feeling of being “adrift” might also have meant suffering brain damage as a result of years in the ring. The esteemed neurologist Dr. Robert Cantu has stated that any autopsy of Tsarnaev should include an examination for signs of the life-altering post-concussive syndromes Cantu has seen in numerous former boxers and NFL players.

 … There has been so much idiotic ink spilled about whether or not the Tsarnaev brothers “should be considered Americans.” What is certain is that the means by which people have historically felt a sense of having a stake in this country have been inexorably altered in the post-9/11 world. This is now a nation defined and scarred by the cruel anti-immigrant policies of both Presidents Bush and Obama. It’s now a nation defined and scarred by pushing people away from that historic safe-haven for immigrants otherwise known as competitive sports. It’s a nation that spawned the brothers Tsarnaev. It’s a nation that must change if future tragedies of violence are to be avoided. This won’t happen by accident. Movements and meetings against Islamaphobia and for the rights of immigrants are great a place to start. Sports may have been bestowed onto immigrants from the top down, but a shift away from fear and toward a more inclusive future will only come from the bottom up.

A friend writes:

Elizabeth Warren at the MIT funeral ceremony said Boston was “locked down by the terror of a few”. No, Warren. Boston was locked down by the state. Boston was locked down by thousands of local, state, out of state and federal police looking for a wounded 19 year old. Boston was locked down with tanks on the streets, house to house searches and racist fear mongering.

And then Joe Biden, (right after he mutters for 10,000 people to hear), that she “looks beautiful today”, goes to the mic, to invoke 9/11 and say they will not give in to fear, when it was fear mongering that effectively shut down the city last week. He goes on to say, in a country still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, with 600 military bases in other people’s lands around the planet, that al Qaeda“cannot destroy us, they cannot occupy us”. He calls the Tsarnaevs “two knockoff jihadis in Boston”. He uses the word jihadi a couple of times, to very intentionally equate an Islamic term with the horror of the marathon bombing.

He only once says something about “apostles of a decent faith”, but he says it in passing, so you wouldn’t really think twice about it, he never actually uses the word “Islam”. He never says “Islam is a decent faith”. So when people ask, “who could do this?”, they now have an Arabic word for it, they now have a face and a faith. They see Muslims, and it doesn’t matter what fear and terror is inflicted on us, it doesn’t matter that a Saudi man recovering from his burns has still not been apologized to for the despicable way he’s been treated by the media and state. No. Biden tells us the country hasn’t given in to fear, hasn’t closed its borders. What’s his proof? He gestures towards MIT’s president, of Venezuelan origin, and says “Listen to his accent!”. Seriously.

THE HUNT for the “whos” ended last Friday with the death of one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings and the capture of a second. But the search for the “whys” has continued in high gear—and it has uncovered depressing evidence of how xenophobia and anti-Islam bigotry shape post-9/11 America.

The bombings were a horrific act. The devices were constructed to maim and planted as if to guarantee that the victims would be random—people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, unlikely to have any power or position of responsibility in society.

So people everywhere naturally want to know why anyone would carry out such sickening violence. But the answers the media have been providing are filled with misinformation and colored by prejudice.

This was true to some extent from the start. But whatever degree of restraint the media showed in the first days evaporated once the bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were identified as Muslims who had immigrated to the U.S. as children from the Caucasus in Russia.

It hasn’t been just the ranting windbags of the right-wing media, either. To be sure, the reactionaries at Fox News seized the chance to heap abuse on their favorite scapegoats. Like Laura Ingraham, who declared that the U.S. should shut down all immigration from countries with a Muslim majority. “Dagestan, Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan, uh-uh,” she said. “As George Bush would say, ‘None of them ‘stans.’”

But supposedly objective media outlets have added to the muck—with their scramble to broadcast any and all scraps of information about the suspects, with little regard for the source or the context.

These reports often come with a qualification—like the CNN reporter who described an innocuous tweet by one suspect and then declared: “It may mean something. It may mean nothing. We don’t know.” But after days of being flooded with trivia and disconnected facts, half-truths and whole untruths, it’s all too easy for people to come up with wrong answers about the “whys.”

As Matthew Kupfer wrote at Registan, a website that covers Eurasian politics, when the media report that Tamerlan Tsarnaev chose Islam from a list of religions to describe his “worldview” at a Russian-based social media site, the implication is that he must be a radical fundamentalist. Likewise, the two suspects’ Chechen origins are tacitly associated with the armed struggle against Russian repression—without any evidence that there is an association.

The aftermath of the Marathon bombings has led to a revival of the kind of anti-Islam myths and falsehoods commonplace after the September 11 attacks—as well as a warped depiction of the history of Chechnya and its people.

If these go unchallenged, they will become part of the justification for the agenda of militarism and state repression, at the expense of people around the world, including in the U.S. So those of us who want to stand against violence and injustice have to start by dispelling the media’s fog of prejudice and misinformation….

 … More than 1 million people in the Boston metro area awoke on Friday morning to find themselves living under a lockdown. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick “requested” that people stay at home, with their doors locked. Thousands of law enforcement personnel were deployed to Watertown. News photos showed a Boston Police Department tank rolling through the streets—a clear symbol of the massive show of force that was outsized for pursuing one badly wounded suspect.

Though we were advised not to leave our houses, many of us living in Cambridge and Boston had no sense of what people in Watertown were subjected to. A video taken by a Watertown resident shows how police carried out house-to-house searches.

The video shows seven officers, armed with automatic weapons, standing on the porch of the house they are about to search. They grab the person who answers the door and force them out onto the sidewalk. All of the other residents and the family dog are removed in similar fashion, with guns trained on them. Once outside, the police proceed to aggressively frisk them. This treatment ends only after police conclude their search, and the family is allowed to return home.

The police have since argued that these aggressive measures were necessary to ensure the safe capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This claim is undermined by the fact that the 19 year old was caught only after the “stay home” order had been lifted. A Watertown resident, seeing blood in his yard, inspected his boat, and found Tsarnaev lying inside.

Tsarnaev’s capture was therefore neither the product of the massively militarized police force nor the regional lockdown. Not surprisingly, in reporting the story about how Tsarnaev was found, many media outlets focused on the police using infrared technology to confirm that someone was in the boat—obfuscating the fact that Tsarnaev’s capture occurred in spite of the lockdown, rather than because of it.

The mainstream media coverage shows us how this whole situation will be exploited in the coming days and weeks.

Look at this article excerpt below. Think about all of the acts of violence and terrorism committed by white Christians over the past few years, including religious-fueled attacked on abortion clinics, etc. Try to imagine a news article ever, ever opening with the statement below, but with the single word “Islamic” replaced by “Christian.” Yeah, I didn’t think so.

“Two U.S. officials say preliminary evidence from an interrogation suggests the suspects in the Boston Marathon attack were motivated by their religious views but were apparently not tied to any Islamic terrorist groups.”

How come he didn’t call for putting all gun-owners under surveillance after Newtown and Aurora; or all Christians, for that matter? Or all military veterans after the Sikh Temple massacre last year, which was carried out by a former US soldier?

UGH! NYTimes’ Islamophobia begins in earnest now that both suspects have been caught or killed. As per usual, the NYTimes will look for the source of the violence in these men’s “loyalties” to “foreign religions”, rather than inspecting the conditions obtaining in the United States which empirically seem to generate frequent outbursts of broken individuals who direct seemingly senseless violence at other Americans. For if we’ve learned anything over the past few years, it’s that no one religion or race has a monopoly on violence and extremism …

Here are some choice excerpts and captions:

“The case of the Boston suspects echoes that of other young men who, caught between life in America and loyalty to fellow Muslims in a distant homeland, turned to violence.”

“Suspects With Foot in 2 Worlds, Perhaps Echoing Plots of Past”

““I think there’s often a sense of divided loyalties in these cases where Americans turn to violent jihad — are you American first or are you Muslim first? And also of proving yourself as a man of action,” said Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington.”

A friend writes:

WBUR Radio Correspondent: “We’re going to bring in a Chechen expert to see if his Chechen background has anything to do with this.”

All of our backgrounds are relevant to our actions. But when Adam Lanza was identified as the shooter at Sandy Hook, I didn’t hear any reporters discuss the need to bring on experts of the suburbs as a cultural phenomenon to understand the actions of this person. After the shooting in Aurora—which also involved a heavily-armed, bomb-making young man, I didn’t hear a reporter bring on experts on Lutheranism, or—imagine this—the violent culture of the United States—to gain clarity on James Holmes’ actions. When the perpetrator of violence like this comes from a dominant culture, that culture is not interrogated to understand the individual’s actions. Instead, the conversation is about their failings as an individual—“mental illness,” “what went wrong,” etc. But when it’s someone from a marginal group—or an oppressed group like Muslims, they can only be a representative of an entire group of people—and that group is presumed violent as a whole culture.

Now THIS is fascinating. (And remember, this is appearing on FOX News’ website!)

===

The Boston Marathon bombings have sparked more anger than fear among Americans, who are confident those responsible will be caught.

That’s according to a Fox News overnight poll of voters nationwide.

Two explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line on Monday killed three and injured 176. 

When asked which best describes how they feel about the bombings, 58 percent of voters say: angry.  That’s double the number who feels worried (27 percent). 

On Tuesday authorities said they had no suspects in custody.  Even so, most voters — 79 percent — are confident the government will catch those responsible.  That includes 41 percent who are very confident and another 38 percent who are somewhat confident the person or people involved will be found.

By a wide 62-20 percent margin, voters think homegrown terrorists are more likely than Islamic terrorists to have been behind the Boston attacks.  Nineteen percent are unsure.

In general, voters say homegrown terrorists like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (51 percent) pose a greater threat on U.S. soil than Islamic terrorists (26 percent). 

While 34 percent of voters are worried about a terrorist attack happening in their area, nearly twice as many — 65 percent — are not concerned. 

 … Almost all voters — 81 percent — say the bombings won’t change how they lead their everyday life, while 18 percent will.  Those living in the Northeast (27 percent) are more likely than those in other regions to say the event will cause them to change things at least a little.

Meanwhile, voters are divided over whether they would be willing to give up some personal freedom to reduce the threat of terrorism.  Forty-three percent say they would, down from 54 percent who felt that way the last time Fox asked the question in 2006.  Forty-five percent say they wouldn’t give up personal freedoms, which is the highest recorded in a Fox poll going back to 1996.

The victim of an apparent hate crime motivated by the Boston Marathon attacks said she loves Boston’s diversity, even if the episode left her shaken Wednesday.

A Palestinian woman said she was assaulted and aggressively harassed while walking with her infant daughter and friend near Malden Center late Wednesday morning, in an apparent hate crime motivated by Monday’s attack at the Boston Marathon.

Malden resident Heba Abolaban said she and her friend, both wearing hijabs, were walking with their children on Commercial Street when a man forcefully punched her left shoulder and began shouting at them.

“He was screaming ‘F___ you Muslims! You are terrorists! I hate you! You are involved in the Boston explosions! F___ you!’” Abolaban remembered. “Oh my lord, I was extremely shocked.”

She said the man – described as a white male in his thirties wearing dark sunglasses – kept shouting and walking toward her as she backed away.

“I did not say anything to him,” she said. “Not even that we aren’t terrorists…he was so aggressive.”

After about two minutes, Abolaban said the man continued his brisk walk toward Malden Center. Shaken, Abolaban called her husband in tears, and then 911.