There is a battle of funny headlines playing out across America.
According to the Wall Street Journal, "Suspects Roused by Jihadist Thought."
Surprisingly, the New York Times headline is "Boston Suspect Cites Islamic Extremist Beliefs as Motive"
The Washington Post, of course, has to take all the religion out of it and blame America."Boston bombing suspect cites U.S. wars as motivation, officials say," reads the Washington Post headline.
Credit where it is due, the Washington Post does a masterful job of blaming America. "[T]he evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world." The Internet and American actions did it.
In the past decade we have seen that not all Muslims are terrorists, but just about every terrorist has been a Muslim.
Time magazine is already exploring whether boxing might have had something to do with it.
It is amazing that within a one week period the media went from speculating that right wingers were celebrating Hitler's birthday on tax day to blaming Chechen nationalism to hearing the bomber say he was inspired by Islam to announcing it's not him, it's us to blame.
Had it been a tea partier who launched a terror attack at the Boston Marathon, the media would spend weeks blaming Republicans, conservatives, talk radio rhetoric, and Fox News hosts for inspiring the bombing.
But because the bomber himself says he was inspired by his religious faith and that faith happens to be Islam, the media will ascribe other reasons to explain the attack that are more palatable to the its liberal sensibilities. As often happens in these cases, the media quickly descends into blaming America first.
One of the most insane pieces of the whole past week was from Marc Ambinder, a respected journalist, who explicitly says we should blame America, not Islam, for the bombers.
So stuck in a liberal world view blinding him to reality, along with most of the press corps in America, he can't see to the actual nugget of truth he's trying to grasp for — liberalism.
Let us be very clear here. In the past decade we have seen that not all Muslims are terrorists, but just about every terrorist has been a Muslim.
As more young Muslim men come of age in a post-modern America, the problem of home grown terrorism is going to be far worse than the terrorism we've previously seen. We see this shaping up in Great Britain.
There, the culture has given up on assimilation. It is more and more considered bigotry to think that there might be some quintessentially English characteristics, values, and manners all must embrace. Instead, people can live on the fringe of society without ever having to assimilate. People, with a natural longing for common culture, concentrate among those most like them. Young Muslim men concentrate with other young Muslim men. In the culture vacuum, they embrace a powerful intoxicant of self-sacrifice for the cause of radical Islam.
The British welfare state allows these young Muslim men to sit on the sidelines as second class citizens, alienated from common British society, without any need to assimilate into British society. It is an inoffensive multiculturalism rotting common culture.
This is beginning to happen here. The melting pot has instead become a pressure cooker.
The Tsarnaev brothers lived in Massachusetts, a state where if Bob wants to be known as Sheila in the public schools, the other kids will get punished for calling Bob . . . well . . . Bob.
Liberalism infests society. The Tsarnaev brothers, like so many immigrants, were not required to assimilate into American society. They were left to do it to the degree they wished on their own as all other immigrants are today. Granted, the younger of the two men was much more assimilated into American life. How much pressure his older brother put on him to abandon American culture in favor of terrorism is something we'll find out about in the coming weeks and months.
Every person wants a sense of belonging. But post-modern America offers no sense of belonging into a greater culture. Each culture is relative.
There is no truth. The very idea of an essential Americanness is racist to many on the left. Left to their own devices, each person in a quest for culture will gravitate to the familiar, the comfortable, and that which elevates the soul with a sense of connection.
Some young black, Hispanic, Asian and even Russian men left out of society often join gangs to find their sense of community.
Many young evangelicals are more and more embracing a quasi-communal near hippy existence, as if reliving the first days of the church, with other young evangelicals intent on separating themselves from the world.
Young white rich kids are becoming trustafarians. That is, they live a nomadic life of near-poverty, traveling around the world, playing at being poor but all the while actually living off mom and dad’s financial largesse.
Then there are young Muslim men adrift in liberal, post-modern America. Their religion is not, contrary to the political correct, a religion of peace, but of submission. Many of the Muslims who are most absorbed into their religion intend to fill the cultural vacuum left by the post-modern liberals of the West with Islam. We will all submit one way or the other. Compared to all other religions in the Twentieth and Twenty-first century, only Islam seems to generate people willing to kill for their religion.
If you do not believe me, announce on Twitter you intend to burn the Koran and see what happens. Remember, we are talking about a religion that, if the Obama White House is to be believed, went into international riots over a poorly produced You Tube video and an idiot pastor in Florida.
We have allowed, due to our liberal values and constitutional priorities on free exercise of religion, the one religion on earth that cannot, in its natural state, peacefully coexist with other religions, to migrate across the map.
Instead of pouring into Islam the western values of toleration for other ideas, values, and ways of life as Islam migrated, liberalism decided that not only would it be bigoted to do, we must not even dare confront it or treat it differently from religions that do not produce suicide bombers and international riots.
Now, in America, we have an untamed religion with calls for submission not tempered by the extra 600 years Christianity has had to temper, a liberalism that has left a cultural vacuum wherein many find themselves adrift looking to their own cultural connections to find their place in the world, and young Muslim men who, in that cultural vacuum, look not just to Islam, but an empowering Islam that can fill deep voids through demands for submission.
Boston is just the beginning.
Erick Erickson is a Fox News contributor and editor of RedState.com. Follow him on Twitter @EWErickson.
