No Breakfast of Champions for Tamarlan

No Breakfast of Champions for Tamarlan

     The August issue of Rolling Stone Magazine gives an excellent description of the lives of the "Boston Bombers".  Anyone can see some of "their own" in the lives of these individuals, particularly if they have lived in the northeast.  However, Tamarlan, a champion boxer, clearly had jihad on his mind, as a personal journey, if not for the retribution of wrongs done by America to Muslims in other countries.  And like McVeigh, this appears to have been his last chance to carry that mission out. He led a mixed-up, evangelical life, to say the least.

     And Jahar?  No parents or roots in America, his only exposure to the economics of life in Cambridge, Mass.  But he did have a car, a green Honda Civic.  His father was a prosecutor in Kyrgyzsatan, before the Russians purged foreigners, while his mother wore her hair like Pat Benatar.  In America, his father had to take a $10 per hour job as a mechanic, and then he finally left the country.  While Jahar's mother finally fled the country to escape a charge of shop-lifting $1600 worth of clothes from Lord and Taylors.

I am waiting for Martin Cruz Smith's new book, Tatiana.  He is always full of insights into modern foreign culture.