Shortly after the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, the Arabs of Gaza danced in the streets, handing out candies to passersby, Israel News Agency reported.
Mohammad al-Chalabi, head of a Jordanian Salafi group, said on Tuesday that he was “happy to see the horror in America’ after the explosions in Boston,” the Daily Mail reported. “American blood isn’t more precious than Muslim blood,” al-Chalabi added. “Let the Americans feel the pain we endured by their armies occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and killing our people there,”
According to the Christian Science Monitor, Somalia’s Al Shabaab mocked the blast victims on its official Twitter feed, and used the attack as an opportunity to criticize U.S. policy. “The #BostonBombings are just a tiny fraction of what US soldiers inflict upon millions of innocent Muslims across the globe on a daily basis,” read one tweet.
Pundit Juan Cole noted that Monday bombings and other mass violence also killed dozens of civilians in Syria and Iraq. The world is stitched together, he wrote, by the common human experiences of sorrow and grief that follow such tragedies.
Al Jazeera’s Khaled A Beydoun, under the headline “Boston explosions: ‘Please don’t be Arabs or Muslims,'” wrote:
The knots in my stomach tightened with preliminary reports from the New York Post that Boston Police had seized a “Saudi National”. In a media nanosecond, “Muslims” was trending on Twitter, additional news providers corroborated the reports, and the hatemongering ensued.
