The younger brother was influenced by his older brother. The older brother never assimilated well. In an article about his boxing, he said "I don't have a single American friend. I don't understand them." He was also known to have watched videos posted by Islamic extremists. So he had the alienation that we often see with mass shooters combined with the influences of Islamic jihadists. Add to that he's from a very poor country living in a wealthy country that he's come to identify as being opposed to Islam.
Editorial in the Boston Globe:
Quote:Get out the violins, because you’re about to read and hear all these stories about how poor Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s troubles had to do with the repression of the Chechens, and the hard nomadic life ethnic Chechens were forced to endure in the shambolic collapse of the Soviet Union.
...Living in a society that respects and encourages diversity, he retreated into a perverse, self-righteous, judgmental view of others who didn’t share his extremist views. And in his final act of selfish venality, he enlisted for his nihilistic denouement his own little brother, brainwashing a kid who by all accounts had made the sort of friendships and social connections that he couldn’t.
...Now that the madness is over, there will be some who say we have to figure out why the Tsarnaevs became such angry young men.
No one who lost his or her life or limbs on Boylston Street last Monday did anything to create angry young men like this. And I know that 8-year-old Martin Richard, a beautiful little boy from Dorchester who was killed by the Tsarnaev brothers’ bomb, never harmed a living thing. He was a kind little boy who was unfailingly nice to his classmate, the daughter of the Boston firefighter who knelt over his body on Patriots Day.
...I don’t want to listen to how innocent people bear some responsibility for creating the twisted minds of the Tsarnaev brothers.
Let us first bury our dead, heal our wounded, tend to our damaged first responders. Then maybe I’ll listen to that “what did we do to make them hate us” claptrap. Then maybe I’ll go to some soul-searching debate about how our foreign policy is creating too many enemies and too few allies.
But then, maybe I won’t.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04...story.html
