The Washington Post published an article by Melinda Henneberger devoted to the Rolling Stone's recent article on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
"The biggest question Bostonians still have about the bombings in their city on Patriot Day is the one they’ve had since right after terror suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested in April: What turns a kid who was not just loved but beloved — the favorite of multiple teachers and coaches, and of many classmates — into someone who could look his victims in the eye before blowing them up, then head off to the gym?" the article reads.
"Janet Reitman’s Rolling Stone piece about Jahar, as the younger Tsarnaev brother was known to his American friends, is an earnest attempt to answer that question. Some critics insist that it’s mostly the glam photo on the cover that offended them, and it does look like a PR shot for a member of a boy band," the author writes.
"But that Reitman’s been getting death threats and around-the-clock calls on her cell phone from strangers who say they hope she dies of a terror attack, too, suggests that the pushback is about a lot more than a soft-focus selfie. And how is terrorizing her standing up against terror? She isn’t giving interviews, but said on her Facebook page that she was surprised and scared by the reaction," the article reads.
"I don’t agree with everything Reitman wrote, but don’t see that her profile romanticizes Jahar. The personality profile is, however, an inherently friendly form, by which I mean that hostility is a barrier to figuring out what makes any story subject tick. No matter how scathing the piece turns out to be, the truth is that a writer has to feel some empathy for his subject to make such a story work," the author believes.
