Пусси Райот -- kkkkk

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 23:50:55 04/24/13 Wed
Author: What Do We Know About the Mysterious "Misha"
Subject: Пусси Райот

The Armenian Who Reportedly Radicalized Boston Bombing Suspect Tsarnaev?

Ever since Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the Boston marathon bomber suspect Tamerlan Tsnaraev, said that some mysterious person of "Armenian descent" who was a "convert to Islam" was the one who radicalized him, a number of us in this field on Twitter have been discussing it.

It seems very odd, as Armenians are not only Christian, but antagonistic to Muslims and Turks since the Armenian genocide. Armenians don't often convert to Islam. If you Google the terms, however, you do see they convert sometimes, that historically, there are certain groups of Armenians in the Caucasus who have converted. The daughter of a famous Armenian singer converted to Islam when she married a Moroccan man, to her family's chagrin and the denunciatino of her community.

When Uncle Ruslan made this statement, which I thought was otherwise exemplary and even heroic in condemning the bombing and even his own relatives if they had perpetrated it, he may not have meant literally "an Armenian," but could have used a generic slur that Chechens might use in their context about anyone who was in the Caucasus but not Muslim. I'm willing to entertain that idea, but I think probably he really meant a specific man of Armenian descent.

Now, there's a report after some diligent journalistic work while we were all just sitting on Twitter from the Mail that says the Armenian is about 30, and they met in 2007.

According to AP's Adam Goldman et. al, the man is red-haired and had a Rasputin-like hold over Tamerlan, according to the sister's ex-husband, i.e. the brother-in-law of Tamerlan, also mentioned the Armenian convert to Islam, and further came up with a name, "Misha".

Obvious, "Misha" is a very common name like "John" in Russia, so that doesn't tell us much.

But I immediately recalled the anguished and angry comment that Tamerlan wrote on a Youtube about a man converting to Islam in Russia, whom he addressed as "Misha".

It's on his Youtube account, in Russian. That website linked is dovodi.ru.

He says (quick translation) on this particular video:

You're not Mihail any more a Misha the way you just were before Islam. You accepted schism not because it convinces you, but due to your passions.

Just as you came to Islam, so you have flown out of it. You have betrayed yourself Misha. Alright, good-bye.

Now, this could be some other Misha -- indeed, that man in the film (who could be the "Mikhail") is young and black-haired and sitting in Russia! But it shows how vehement he is with a sense of rectitude and righteousness about what is and is not proper Islam and proper conversion.

Or...could it be an angry denunciation of the same Misha in whose thrall he once was -- it's common for people to be entranced by cultists and then at some point become disenchanted and angry with them? Why, if Tamerlan himself grew more radicalized by a "Misha" of Armenian extraction, is he so angry at the "Misha" in this film who is converting and accusing him of being a schismatic?

In the case of Tamerlan, we know he took the direction of becoming more extreme and demanding purity -- he denounced the imam at his mosque in the Boston area for speaking well of Martin Luther King, Jr., calling MLK a "kafir," which means "infidel" or "unbeliever" who is not Muslim. At best, this "Misha" referenced video appears to be yet another indication of his rigid thinking and doesn't shed any more light on that radicalizing "Misha" said to be of Armenian descent.

In doing various Russian-language searches of the issue of Armenian converts to Islam, I found another video about an Armenian convert apparently in the US, on a channel called KavkazMuslimUSA (Kavkaz means "Caucasus," i.e. the region of Russia where Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, etc. are located).

This video uploaded in June 2012 appears to show a slight, somewhat balding and somewhat red-haired man of about 30 on the far right yet he doesn't appear Armenian; the convert who is said to be Armenian is the younger dark-haired man on the couch.

It's on the KavkazMuslimUSA channel, but says it is published by islamreligion.com/ru, which is the Saudi-owned site.

I have no idea if this is "Misha" who radicalized Tamerlan whatsoever -- his name is not indicated. In fact, this gets into the realm of the sort of Google witch-hunting for which Reddit has been denounced. This kind of analysis is better done by the FBI and real journalists than real-time Twitterers.

Even so, I'm of the school of thought, however, that public figures in public videos publicly posted on Youtube, just like the many public pictures posted which Reddit discussed, can and should be discussed freely in a free society not only because that is the bedrock of our free society but because such discussion is about not having terrorists take away its freedoms and ensuring that we understand who they are, where they come from, what groups they may be affiliated with, and bringing them to justice as well as understand how to deter future terrorist acts.

At the very least, this KavkazMuslim organization behind this channel could be asked if they know anything about "Misha" or could eliminate any seeming connection given the "Armenian convert" theme.

Looking for any Armenian connection in the Tsarnaev brother's story, I find only an anti-Armenian connection, if you will. Larry Aaronson, the history teacher who was a neighbour of the Tsarnaev's, whom @J_tsar mentions in his Twitter feed when he bumps into him, has appeared widely in the media describing his shock at learning that this nice kid was charged with the bombing. Aaronson is a leftist radical, a student and admirer of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Intriguingly, he's also the same teacher (not a teacher of the Tsarnaevs, but a man who knows them as a neighbour evidently) who is mentioned in the story of the triple murders in Waltham. That's the grisly crime that journalists are now pondering as possibly connected to Tamerlan Tsarnaev. One of the victims was his best friend and came from his boxing club. Without any evidence -- except some dark suspicion that a terrorist suspect from Chechnya could be capable of a really grisly throat-slitting murder, too -- journalists have asked whether Tamerlam himself committed this murder and then made it look like a drug hit.

Aside from showing up to comment on both the Tsarnaevs after they were accused of the bombing and showing up to remark on Tamerlan's best friend who was murdered, Aaronson is also publicly known for having launched an effort to prevent the teaching of the Armenian genocide as a fact, but wanted it described as one version of the story. I chalk up the strange appearance of Aaronson in both stories as a propensity for media attention -- many people on Twitter who know him were groaning when he surfaced to comment on the Tsarnaevs. Looking at all this, I think it's a collage of Google factoids that adds up to nothing (so far): I doubt Aaronson knows anything more about what radicalized the Tsarnaevs or who Misha is, but somebody should ask, especially since he, too, was driven to take a public position critical of Armenians' insistence on the validation of their genocide and because he felt bold enough to comment on both the Tsarnaevs and the murder victims and knew them all.

Why should every stone, even if tandential like this be turned over? Because I don't think that people self-radicalize only from reading Al Qaeda websites and watching jihad videos; I think they need a human connection even if they sit on the Internet all day. That's because they need a peer who approves of them and sanctions violence, so as to enable them to cross the threshold of their conscience, which would contain upbringing not to kill, and revulsion against killing -- especially given that these are not the children of Chechen rebels, but the children of law-enforcers -- lawyers of some kind working for the state with at least one relative who works as a policeman for Kadyrov. They fled Chechnya and do not appear to be involved in rebel groups there -- if anything, they are the opposite, if they went to Dagestan, where the leadership and the people there are very angry at Chechen resistance fighters whom they see as only causing them problems -- remember Basayev's invasion of Dagestan. The leadership and the people tend to be pro-Putin for law-and-order's sake.

I think the Chechen and Dagestani connections still must be researched. I continue to research my own hypothesis about whether Kadyrov's hand is in this. I don't have any proof for it, but that doesn't matter because I think in sifting through the information, everyone constructs self-fulfilling hypotheses with confirmation bias, no one is perfectly unbiased, and with an explicit framework, you can test a hypothesis to see if it fits.

My belief that Kadyrov either scripted this or let nature take its course is based on a hunch, on knowing of Putin's angst over the Magnitsky list and determination for symmetrical and asymmetrical revenge. Three days before the bombing, Kadyrov spoke out on the Magnitsky list issue, but it was nonchalant and not threatening, and the only regret he seemed to have was that his race horse wasn't allowed to participate in a race in the US (because the State Department strongly suggested to the organizers that Kadyrov was accused of massive human rights violations and said it was not advisable, and they complied).

There is absolutely no proof that Putin ordered or sanctioned these bombings or anything related to them. But given how often Chechens show up to murder Russian journalists, and are hired killers in Russia, and given how many massive human rights violations Putin is associated with, the question simply has to be asked, and many times over.

The theory about the Litvinenko case is that the FSB with Putin's tactit approval did poison him, and precisely with polonium 210 so that there would be absolutely no doubt that the Kremlin was involved and not rogue agents or freelancers. That's because only the state would have access to something as dangerous as plutonium.

I never believed that Putin ordered the 1999 apartment bombings but as I've explained, it's possible a rogue agent got involved in it (and I don't think it's the Yeltsin Family's fault, either). Funny, Boris Berezovsky, who bought off the Chechen fighters, negotiated with them, paid them staggering ransom fees to free journalists in their clutches, opened factories to give them domestic business, got involved constantly in the issue when he was national security advisor -- commits suicide, and now this, Chechens accused of terrorism in Boston. Berezovsky fueld the story of the apartment bombings as Putin's work through an entire industry of books, movies, speakers, etc. I do have to say that anyone who attempted to seriously examine the apartment explosions, in parliament or in journalism, ended up dead. I don't think it's advisable to pursue. I personally don't think even Putin is capable of blowing up his own Russians in Moscow.

For me, the single biggest factor for continuing to keep open my hypothesis is the fact that the FSB told the FBI to watch Tamerlan Tsarnaev and claimed he was in touch with radical groups. They contacted him in 2011, and now we're told in a rather odd story sourced to a Dagestani policeman claiming NBC provenance (which doesn't seem to be there) that the FSB contacted the FBI six months ago in November 2012, too. We're also told that Tamerlan's internal Russian passport -- yes, the Soviet system of propiska or registration of domestic travel is still in place! -- was lost and that he sought a new one -- and that it has been lying in the office waiting for pick up. Odd.

What this chain of events in a troubled and wary relationship of these various intelligence agencies in Russia and the US means is that somebody either dropped the ball, or let nature take its course. The FBI could not pursue it for civil rights reasons which we must all respect and in fact have faith in -- this is a separate discussion I will have later. But Russia doesn't have those civil rights scruples or laws, and they must have followed Tamerlan not only when he went back to Dagestan to visit his parents for six months last year; they most certainly would have tracked him with an eagle eye when he and his father went to Chechnya itself twice during that time to visit relatives, possibly even that policeman who works for Kadyrov. (They went to Urus-Martan). When did he lose the passport and how was he able to travel? Did he really lose it?

And why are Dagestani authorities now saying they show no record of his having travelled to Dagestan? Did he use a Kyrgyz passport and therefore not show up as such?

Much has been made about the "mispelling" of his name on the Aerofloat passenger list. This isn't "mispelling" but just different ways of transliteration -- there are always multiple ways of transliterating names -- it could be Tsarnayev, Zarnayev, Zarnaev, Sarnayev -- anything is possible. He spelled it in English in America as Tsarnaev.

There's been a whole industry of specialists mining the Chechen and North Caucasus angle -- everything from trying to see if the Tsarnaevs were traumatized war refugees with PTSD, to valiant mountain people known for their warrior nature bent on heeding the wolf calls of their ancestors, to people with a propensity for some kind of extreme version of Islam or infiltration of Al Qaeda. All of these are stereotypes or even erroneous in that they don't capture the Chechen identity as it has been in fact fractured in the last decades. The role of the tayp or clan hasn't been studied at all in this story possibly because the tayp, once as -- or more -- important to the individual and his family than Islam has diminished in Chechen society and fractured due to war and migration. These boys were born in Tokmok, the Kyrgyz town where the Chechen diaspora was exiled brutally under Stalin, and are described now by their former Kyrgyz teacher interviewed for RFE/RL as being traumatized and quiet and fearful when they arrived there after fleeing Chechnya, but we just can't be sure of that obviously.

I don't have a thing against mining their geographical, ethnic, and religious affiliations for sign of terrorism because I really don't think there is anyone prepared to put "the whole Chechen nation on trial" as EurasiaNet's editor has claimed -- if anything, those are the calls heard in Russia, not America, where people are still trying to figure out the difference between Czech Republic and Chechnya. Discussion has to be free, untrammelled, devoid of fears of being politically correct, and we must have the right to be wrong if we are to be free of diktat from anyone.

Indeed, I remember the funny cartoon we all had hanging on our office wall in the 1990s when we all worked on Chechnya. The reporter interviews people and asked them what Chechnya is. A middle-aged woman says, "Oh, my grandmother used to make those, they're delicious." A young man says, "Mike Chechnya? Doesn't he play for the Maple Leafs?" (or some sports team, I forget). Another person says "Gesundheit!" and there are like a half dozen other funny things in that vein illustrating that Americans have no clue what Chechnya is.

Let me tell you something -- an important US ambassador once came to my office for a briefing and just had no idea where to find it on a map. I showed him. He had no idea of the costs of the war and asked how many were killed a day, but seemed satisfied he didn't have to care that much if the figure was less than during WW II.

But while mining all this ethnic/geo stuff, I think it's fine to look at the wider Islamist issue and the Al Qaeda or Saudi connection, and even go back to my very original hypothesis before the names came out -- Anonymous and Occupy, i.e. domestic radical movements which are very looseknit and can be just about anything to large numbers of extremists of various types. I keep asking why these boys were at MIT! They went to MIT *first*! They FIRST killed a security guard there, THEN hijacked the car and took the hostage and stole the money from the ATM. Why did they go to MIT with guns and bombs unless they wanted to sketch out a semblance of being related to vigilantism associated with Aaron Swartz's case?

But while we are far from knowing everything about this case, there is a very felt need to shut it down. On the left particularly the net-nannying to stifle free discussion is HUGE. Scolding about wrong guesses is ENORMOUS. For people endlessly fretting about whether the suspect will be read his Miranda warning, they are awfully quick to shut down the First Amendment and the right to be wrong. This is hugely troubling to me.

What's happening today is with amazing speed, given our times, the left, liberals and "progressives" are now putting this story to bed with a pronouncement that "the Internet did it" and "they are self-radicalized".

Just like the Al Qaeda or the Kadyrov versions have their confirmation biases, this is a confirmation bias, too, of course, from those who never wanted to see anything having to do with Russia, Islam, ethnicity or anti-Americanism to blame for this terrorism.

Rather, many are very driven by a felt need to see this as a function of "America's wars abroad with chickens coming home to roost" -- in this case, chickens that have lived here for 10 years and Americanized.

I think it's all good to construct this hypothesis and act upon it by ensuring that America doesn't wage needless wars abroad -- I opposed the invasion of Iraq and urged the bringing home of troops from Afghanistan. I can bet my bottom dollar that none of the "progressives" embracing this theme, however, are going to suggest more censorship of the Internet and of these videos (and I couldn't advocate that either). If anything, they will say, "See what happens when you drone Al-Awlaki? It gives him more followers". Perhaps that is true, but it's certainly wise to debate it.

I'm interested to see the arc of this story.

The story is not based on the FBI's own completed and publicized official research, testified in court, with witnesses or experts.

The first story to appear was based on one counter-terrorism expert, of which there are no shortage in this country of varying degrees of quality, who said he was "briefed" by the FBI. Who is he and why does he get to be briefed by the FBI?

Then, Jake Tapper of CNN and Washington Post appeared to say they had "US officials familiar with the interviews," but those could be briefed persons, not the FBI agents who did the interviews in person. I've seen this phenomenon many times before -- for example, "officials" briefed the press saying there was not much of a case against Bradley Manning over and over again, but then...in fact he confessed and there was a case.

The CT experts and ex-FBI on Twitter, to a man, lean toward minimizing terror because they feel that the way to appear as a sharp and savvy insightful analyst is to go against what they see as the tide -- right-wing Christian fundamentalist hysteria about Muslims and infowars.com sort of trutherism and "false-flag" nonsense.

I can see how they got that way, but I think it dumbs down thought. You have to constantly triangulate in a story like this.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Пусси Райот -- Luke Harding and Vikram Dodd, 23:56:30 04/24/13 Wed
- Пусси Райот -- Peter Weber, 23:58:41 04/24/13 Wed