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Friday, March 29, 2024

A Tale of Two Brothers, Two Theories & Twitter

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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev made his first court appearance from his hospital room in Boston on Monday, April 22.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev made his first court appearance from his hospital room in Boston on Monday, April 22.
In case you’ve been living under a rock: two Chechnyan brothers, Tamarlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were responsible for the Boston Marathon massacre. With Tamarlan dead, all that’s left on a quest for answers regarding a motive behind the tragedy is his younger brother: a nineteen-year-old college student named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the young man seen in pictures all over the net sporting an unassuming smile and Jewfro known to friends simply as Jahar.

It’s no secret that Tamarlan was radicalized. He hated America and declared he has no American friends because “I just don’t understand them.” But from reading literally every single article out there about the brothers, Jahar just seems so (dare I say) normal… at least according to his Twitter account.

You laugh, but at a time where social media is responsible for changing the world (most recently, in chasing down both suspects), Twitter says a lot.

So there I was in the late hours of Friday evening, going through every tweet on Dzhokhar’s account for the past two years. Feeling part creepy part citizen sleuth, I needed to know why he did it. And then two theories emerged, both backed up by none other than the suspect’s own tweets.

One is that Dzhokhar himself is the biggest victim to have emerged from the Boston Marathon bombings, a victim of radicalized brainwashing by older brother Tamarlan. To add to this theory, there’s this: Boston police suspect that Tamarlan’s official cause of death is a result of being run over by Dzhokhar in efforts to evade the police during a shootout. If the theory of Jahar’s naive participation holds up, those who want to #freejahar—a movement started by Jahar’s friends in the social media that insists of his innocence– – should take comfort that one of his last acts as a free man was to unchain himself from his brother forever. Some time during the police shootout, he probably figured he’d have to kill Tamarlan if he hoped to escape, and in an act of defiance against his older sibling that came all too late, he decided to do it.

Here are some Tweets by @J_tsar, an account officially confirmed to belong to Dzhokhar. Tweets that support a theory that Jahar was a typical teenage guy, more consumed by girls and HBO’s Game of Thrones than darker thoughts of terrorism.

He was witty, with a sarcastic sense of humor as seen from a December 3rd, 2012 tweet:

My goal for the 2013 year is to get a girl pregnant and become a daddy #saidnooneever

But he didn’t let sarcasm get the best of him, as seen from a December 24, 2012 tweet:

My last tweets felt too wrong, I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their actions

He wrote about marriage on March 22 of this year, barely a month before the explosions:

my mom’s tryina arrange a marriage for me aha she needs to #chillout i’ll find my own honey

He liked HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones, or at least, talking about it (mentioned here in a retweet by @TroyCrossley):

@J_tsar just called me a pervert cus I like @GameOfThrones hmmmmmm lol

Also, he was pro-Palestine from a November 28 tweet:

Free Palestine

But the catch is that he wasn’t pro-Palestine in the way that radicalized Muslims. Right after Free Palestine he wrote:

I was going to make a joke about Hamas but it’s Israeli inappropriate

How ironic that a convicted terrorist would care about cracking jokes at the expense of Israel… let alone, anyone (but particularly Israel). Ironic and yet, it goes with what a lot of friends attest to the suspect’s character. He did not like to offend others.

And now for the second theory, which is that Jahar was radicalized himself and dangerous by his own accord. That he did not need much of a push from his older brother to go forth with the bombing. This is the one that friends of the convicted terrorist can’t seem to comprehend, convinced the guy they knew would never hurt a fly. But evidence to the contrary comes in the form of victim Jeff Bauman’s account of the tragedy. Bauman reveals that Jahar looked him straight in the eye before placing his backpack at his feet and fleeting the scene. The victim would later have both his legs amputated.

Bauman is a young man no different than any one of Jahar’s friends—the same friends who started the #freejahar movement on Twitter, proudly proclaiming his innocence. But if this theory holds up, then maybe Jahar’s friends never knew the “real” Jahar at all. If it holds up, it means that for once Jahar no longer has to hide his true self. The bombing shows a convergence of his laid back personality, mixed with his true, violent character. He no longer has to hide his Dark Passenger (reference included for Dexter fans, Google it). And so, there’s no need to #freejahar if that’s the case. Laying in that Beth Israel hospital bed with nothing left to hide, he is at last, free.

Here are some tweets that support the darker side of Dzhokhar.

On 9/1 he revealed himself to be a 9/11 Truther, (yup, one of those):

Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job, I mean I guess fuck the facts y’all are some real #patriots #gethip

And two more Tweets, both written shortly before the bombing. Both provide psychological clues of a young man with a skewed perception of who the bad guys actually are.

From March 20: Evil trumps when good men do nothing

From April 7: If you have the knowledge and the inspiration, all that’s left is to take action

Also the famous tweet heard round the world, the one written shortly after the bombings. The one that seems almost self indulgent given the facts. This he tweeted on the day of the bombing:

Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people

And last but not least, a tweet from a day after the bombings that read:

So then I says to him, I says, relax my bro my beard is not loaded

Shortly after, someone re-tweeted: “But my backpack is.”

So who was the real Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? The facts remain that he is the murderer of three, and attempted murderer of hundreds more. Out of respect for his victims, my inquisitive mind finds solace in that, regardless of motive, this is the label that shall suffice.

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