More on why Lindsey Graham is wrong

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tends to shoot off his mouth;  hence he is a frequent guest on Sunday morning talk shows.   He often tends to be wrong, even -- or especially -- when it's about national security issues.   As a former military lawyer, he thinks this gives him credibility;  but his hysterical hawkishness undermines that.

His latest screed was insisting that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be held as an enemy combatant, even though he is a naturalized American citizen and has no known connection with any organized terrorist or nationalistic group.  Lindsey is simply wrong on this:  he's playing national security politics, trying to discredit Obama, by trying to paint him as insufficiently warrior-like on national security.    Never mind the Constitutional rights of citizens.

Jay Bookman has a good perspective on this in his Sunday AJC column.    Pointing out that we have had a series of bombing attacks from home-grown, alienated, "lone wolf" citizens who have sought and identified with some ideology but who were not part of any organized, foreign conspiracy.

He cites:  Timothy McVeigh and the paranoid militia movement;  Eric Rudolph and Christian identity theology;  the Fort Hood shooter and Islamic extremism, while also being an active U. S. military officer;  another Islamic extremist attacked a Sikh temple (hardly a symbol of America);  and Ted Kaczynski was motivated by neo-Luddism.

Bookman rightly links the Tsarnaev brothers with this group as lone-wolf alienated young men who may bomb American sites -- but it is their alienation, not their ideology, that we should focus on as the cause.   In this sense, are they so different from the Columbine kids, the Aurora, Colorado theater shooter, and many others?

I think we can consider the surviving Tsarnaev brother as primarily following his older brother rather than acting out of his own alienation.   To outward appearances, he was not alienated.    But Tameran Tsarnaev was -- and here's how that matters.

He had a promising career as a Golden Gloves New England champion boxer.  He lived the life of swagger and fancy clothes (white fur and snakeskin shoes).   But then they changed the Golden Gloves rules and banned non-citizens from competing in the national championship.   So he gave boxing up, dropped out of the social life he had enjoyed and turned to religion.   He got married, and his wife converted to Islam.  He claimed he didn't have a single American friend.  Yes, he got more involved in Islam religious practice and in radical ideology on the internet.

But that seems to have occurred primarily after he was rejected by the "land of opportunity" because he did not belong.  And, we should add, he was here legally and had applied for citizenship.

Bookman does not carry it this far, but I will raise the question:   are these alienated lone wolves so different, then, from the organized Islamic terrorist groups?   Is it perhaps a difference of scale and organization, where the jihadist movement depends on harnassing just such alienation and resentment over being rejected and humiliated?

Western invasion and exploitation of Islamic countries has a history long before Iraq.   Look what we did to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government in Iran.   Look at the plight of the Palestinians.   Look at the occupation of Libya by the French, etc., etc.  Look at the drone strikes that kill civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere.

They do not hate us because of our freedom, as our conservative "patriots" prefer to think.   They hate us because of what we have done, and are doing, to them and their countries.

We should keep that in mind.

Ralph