The Mob and the Multitude

Was it the drones or the mortgage? Certainly, Faisal Shahzad has made no claims; all we have to go by is the infuriatingly racist coverage. Faisal Shahzad is a Pakistani-American, but according to the media, he’s a PAKISTANI american, who the media emphasizes, had been a citizen for just one year. Good liberal Pakistanis have gotten into the act throwing a pity party about all that’s wrong with Pakistanis and urging Pakistani-Americans to cooperate. In the rush to assign nationality to acts of terror, they forget that Shahzad was living in the US for over a decade. So was Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood bomber gunman. And Anwar al-Awlaki is a US citizen who was partially raised there. These people are obviously pissed and it’s possible that they’re pissed about the Iraq war, about Afghanistan, about Pakistan, about the attack on Muslims both in their home countries and their marginalization and demonization within the west. But if that is true, then one could almost say that all paths of terror lead through the US, or at least some toxic transnational mix.

Joshua Keating has a good list of contradictory reportage about Faisal Shahzad to highlight what we don’t know. Here’s my addition:

• Shahzad went to North Waziristan. But, maybe he didn’t.
• His family lives in a Karachi neighborhood. But, not according to the residents of the neighborhood. I asked them.
• His family was placed in protective custody or  arrested from Karachi. It was not his family. They were taken from a mosque. There were five of them. There were eight of them.
• “Security officials” took them, maybe military intelligence. Where are these men? Who’s holding them? Who’s interrogating them?
• American intelligence planes were used to locate Shahzad, but maybe not.
• He was a lone wolf. He’s with the Taliban. They’ve gone global. Attack North Waziristan NOW.

Rachel Maddow says it:

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