Georgetown professor on Tsarnaev’s radicalism: He liked a lot of rap, too

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow featured a Georgetown University professor on her show Monday night, who suggested that rap may have influenced Tamerlan Tsarnaev just as much as Islam did.

The two speculated on whether Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — the brothers suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon — were radicalized in the United States or overseas and whether ideology played a role.

“We have some evidence of a YouTube page that we think may connect to the older brother [Tamerlan] that posted some radicalized YouTube clips,” Ms. Maddow said.

Charles King, author of “The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus,” then interjected, saying that “there are an equal number of rap videos” on Tamerlan’s YouTube channel.

“So, you know, I don’t know why we tend to focus on this one particular aspect,” he continued. “Because these guys frankly have a lot of consonants in their names and we’re kind of worried about that somehow. But in lots of other contexts of mass killing, we go to other kinds of motivations and I think we really ought to look at those in this case as well.”