Something odd happened when the identity of Suspect No. 2, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, became public last week: His name was greeted with words of . . . praise.
A former classmate said Dzokhar was “soft spoken but very, you know, funny, very sweet, wouldn’t harm a fly, someone that you would want to talk to.” She professed to having had a crush on him.
“A beautiful, beautiful boy,” Dzokhar was called — repeatedly, in interviews and on Twitter — by a public-radio journalist whose nephew had hung out with him.
One of his high-school teachers was even more effusive: Dzhokhar, he said, “had a heart of gold, he was a sweetheart, he was gracious, he was caring, he was compassionate.”
These weren’t the traditional post-crime neighborly responses — you know, “nice guy,” “very polite,” “kept to himself.” Nor were these people speaking ruefully in the “oh my God, I was conned by this kid, what the hell is the matter with me” way.
These salutes to Dzokhar Tsarnaev seem amazingly overheated, even if you accept that he was one type of person in high school and turned into another the next year.
Heart of gold? Compassionate? Gracious? Caring? “Beautiful, beautiful boy?” I don’t know that I’ve ever read such unmitigatedly kind things said about a teenage male, even a nice one.
These adults were grading him on a peculiar curve.
Dzhokhar was clearly one of the types Feodor Dostoyevsky, in his landmark novel about terrorism, called “The Demons.” But these tributes make him sound more like Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin from “The Idiot” — the incarnation of goodness driven to madness by society’s ills.
These testifiers and others who testified to Dzhokhar’s essential wondrousness are, I’m sure, decent people careful about offendingothers’ sensitivities. So what might have possessed them to issue such panegyrics while mourners wept and others were grappling with the fact that they would live life without legs?
Perhaps they were insensitive in this case because they had spent so much time being sensitive — to Dzhokhar.
I don’t know them, but I know where they live — in and around Cambridge, Mass. — and I know that it’s a lot like where I grew up and where I live now on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In such precincts, a soft-spoken Muslim kid like Dzhokhar is more likely to be considered a special catch than eyed suspiciously as a potential terrorist.
Where I live, one is far more inclined to hear about the dangers of Islamophobia than the dangers posed by Islamist radicalism.
There are, in fact, few crimes against humanity more repellent to left-liberal opinion in enlightened corners these days than Islamophobia — an evil affliction that, we are told, has produced a dangerously hostile cultural and political atmosphere in this country.
And in some of these precincts, especially places that swell with pride in their own multicultural and hyper-liberal virtue, the very threat of Islamophobia has produced something very nearly its opposite.
We saw it at work in this city a few years ago when the proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero was all the rage. When opponents called this an act of insensitivity, given the Islamist ideology that had led to the planes being flown into the Towers and the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, the more enlightened among us (including this city’s mayor) reared in horror. This was Islamophobia, pure and simple, they said.
Rallies in support of the mosque were organized. You could barely walk a step without someone professing his deep admiration and friendship for Faisal Rauf, an imam connected to the project who’d served on numerous interfaith committees over the previous decade.
There was a sensitivity conflict here: Liberal opinion, which prides itself on its sympathy to the wounded and grieved, was forced to choose sides — and chose the multiculturalist side. (The glorious Rauf has since been sued on the grounds that he diverted millions from the moneys raised for the unbuilt mosque for his personal use.)
Was this kind of anti-Islamophobia at work in the eye-opening way people who had some acquaintance with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev spoke about him last week?
Had the idea that he should be given the benefit of the doubt due to his background become so instinctual to them that they spoke favorably of his character without thinking about how they might be making excuses for the inexcusable?