{"id":4927,"date":"2013-04-19T17:41:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-19T21:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4927"},"modified":"2014-03-06T06:00:05","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T11:00:05","slug":"im-a-bit-ahead-of-the-press-on-the-boston-bombing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4927","title":{"rendered":"Iranian connection in the Boston bombing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the terrorist who died in a firefight with the Boston police with a kettle bomb strapped to him, had a YouTube page.  Examining an image of it, I found an approving link to a movie titled &#8220;The Black Flags of Khorasan&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Because, unlike the politically-correct idiots who infest our nation&#8217;s newsrooms, I&#8217;ve actually studied the history of Islam in some detail, that title had immediate resonance for me.  I thought I knew what it meant, and I googled.<\/p>\n<p>What I found confirmed my hunch.  Not just that <a href=\"http:\/\/blackflags1.blogspot.com\/\">Black Flags from Khorasan<\/a> is a jihadist propaganda movie, but that it&#8217;s a jihadi movie of a particularly interesting kind &#8211; Mahdist, and almost certainly radical Shi&#8217;a.  Mahdism is present in Sunni but much less central, and in any case the region of Khorasan has been the heart country of Shi&#8217;a for nearly a thousand years.<\/p>\n<p>Domestic terrorism, my ass. As usual, the mainstream media was slavering to pin this on some Richard-Jewell-like native-born conservative (bonus points if they get to say &#8220;Tea Party&#8221;).  As usual, it&#8217;s a jihadi atrocity in which fundamentalist Islam was causal.<\/p>\n<p>But that film is a more specific clue.  If the investigators have even a microgram of brains, they&#8217;re looking for an Iranian connection now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the terrorist who died in a firefight with the Boston police with a kettle bomb strapped to him, had a YouTube page. Examining an image of it, I found an approving link to a movie titled &#8220;The Black Flags of Khorasan&#8221;. Because, unlike the politically-correct idiots who infest our nation&#8217;s newsrooms, I&#8217;ve actually&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4927\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Iranian connection in the Boston bombing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4927"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5315,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4927\/revisions\/5315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}