In the hours after the smoking SUV shut down Times Square, talk of who might be responsible indicated an unwillingness to say aloud what many were thinking. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, speculated it was “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.’’ But bomb suspect Faisal Shahzad is not a “tea-partier-gone-wild or someone unable to take the pressure of home foreclosure, as some news reports intimated,” wrote Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. “He told authorities his efforts to blow up innocent people are connected to the Pakistani Taliban.”
Nine years after Sept. 11, she went on, “the average citizen gets it. Some Muslim extremists want to kill Americans and will keep on trying to accomplish their mission. It’s the first thought that registers when a bomb is placed in cars, shoes or underwear by someone described as Muslim. What’s so terrible about acknowledging that link?” But that prompts another question: Would acknowledging a link make us safer?
Follow us
