13 May, 2013

To bury, not to praise - Metro - The Boston Globe

To bury, not to praise - Metro - The Boston Globe: Plenty of others have been controlled by irrational thoughts the way the Tsarnaevs were. Many are broken, as Adam Lanza and Seung-Hui Cho demonstrate all too well. As much as we’d like to fully dissociate ourselves from that evil, we can’t. They’re human, like us.

We have buried men like this. We have also buried Mafia bosses, some of them mass murderers, sometimes with grand funerals. Do their bodies better deserve to be treated as human, their relatives’ wishes better deserve honoring, because they were motivated by greed and sadism, rather than a twisted, hateful sense of injustice?

Will the aged Whitey Bulger – accused of murdering 19 people, for profit, pride, and pleasure – be left lying in a funeral home when his time comes because people are outraged at the evil of his alleged acts?

No. So far, we appear to have decided we should withhold burial from only one kind of �irrational killer: the one who is not American, the one who kills in the name of Islam. And in so doing, we play right into the hands of others like him.