HBO’s Bill Maher discussed the matter with Brian Levin,Director of Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism:

At one point Levin calls out”Pamela Geller”.

Well, she and the likes of Steve Emerson and Glenn Beck have been pointing the finger at a Saudi Arabian student who was injured in the blast. Here’s Beck:

We at the Blaze know that this Saudi national is a bad, bad, bad man … This administration is playing an extraordinarily dangerous game. They have very little regard for what it takes to be a citizen. Before the sequester cuts happened, they opened the prison and let illegals out. Who does that? Remember also, the Saudi national that was — is about to get on a plane — involved in blowing the legs off of American citizens, being held in protective custody or being protected, at least, by our administration. He will be put in protective custody and the plans are to deport him.  

All wrong.

On the very day of the bombing, the New York Post reported on a Saudi “suspect“. That was wrong.

Of course, the Saudi is likely to be Mulsim. So. Was this an example of Islamophobia? You should be free to criticise Islam without being labelled a bigot. But critics should be scrutinised. They too can be criticised.

The Saudi national is in a Boston hospital and “is not a suspect, nor is he a person of interest. He was an individual at the marathon, and therefore, like so many individuals, has been questioned,” said the DHS. His name is Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi. He’s an innocent. He’s a victim twice over.

But other were unsure. Steve Emerson wrote in WorldNetDaily

“I just learned from my own sources that he is now going to be deported on national security grounds next Tuesday, which is very unusual,” Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism told Sean Hannity of Fox News Wednesday night.

The Reuters news agency reported President Barack Obama met with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal on Wednesday, noting “the meeting was not on Obama’s public schedule.”

After that meeting was mentioned, Emerson told Hannity, “That’s very interesting because this is the way things are done with Saudi Arabia. You don’t arrest their citizens. You deport them, because they don’t want them to be embarrassed and that’s the way we appease them.”

Smell that? The implication seems clear: the Saudi is not innocent and Obama is helping him. But Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says it is not so. “I am unaware of anyone who is being deported for national security concerns at all related to Boston. I don’t know where that rumor came from,” Napolitano said.

The full story seems to be this:

Boston – The Department of Homeland Security tells CNN that there has been some confusion and misreporting regarding two different Saudi nationals.

There is one Saudi national who is in a Boston hospital, and has been questioned by the FBI because he was at the marathon during the terrorist attack.

He is not a suspect, nor is he a person of interest. He was an individual at the marathon, and therefore, like so many individuals, has been questioned.

There is a second Saudi national from the Boston area who is in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for being in violation of his visa. This ICE custody has nothing to do with the Boston Marathon, officials from the Department of Homeland Security said.

Geller demandsthat “American People Must Demand the Full Story”.

Jim Hoft went on the Gateway Pundit site:

Tonight Steven Emerson told Sean Hannity that the non-suspect Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi is being deported back to the Saudi Kingdom.

Barack Obama met with the Saudi foreign minister today. It was not on public schedule.

UPDATE: Shoebat Foundation reported that ali Alharbi had links to several Al-Qaeda terrorists.

Sarah AB notes:

The Muslim community, and others, are right to express reasoned concerns about the way some critics of Islam express themselves without being tarred as intolerant and deceitful extremists, eager to clamp down on free speech, or as apologists for abuses carried out in the name of Islam.

So. Islam? Max Fisher writes about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s viewing habits:

One of the “favorite” videos lists “7 steps to a successful prayer.” Another denounces Sufism, a more mystical branch of Islam. Another, with the title “one of the signs of Allah,” shows a chameleon changing colors at will as a man sings Arabic prayers in the background.

Several of the videos under “Islam” are by a man named Abdülhamid Al Juhani, who is listed by a Salafist Web portal as a scholar. His videos include Arabic audio and Russian text and show photos of Grozny, the Chechen capital. Another video under the “Islam” heading shows young men carrying assault rifles through a forest as a narrator intones, “They demonize as terrorists anyone who supports Islam.”

Update: Mother Jones’s Adam Serwer also looks at the YouTube page. He says it includes “a video of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter” as well as a video “dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, which is embraced by Islamic extremists — particularly Al Qaeda.”

Bob McManus says the NYPD  were right:

Just as it’s time for politicians — and especially the press — to stop chewing on Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s leg over the NYPD’s so-far-enormously-successful anti-terrorist surveillance programs.

Knock wood on the “successful” part, of course. If America has learned anything about terrorism since 9/11, it’s that the threat is incessant, though hugely unpredictable as to source, specific motivation and any given terrorist’s tool kit of choice. . . .

No doubt the dark fantasies that put the Boston bombers into motion will be teased out of their personal histories in the days and weeks to come. But there was enough on the record yesterday to discern radical Islamist motives in their plot.

That is, to ratify once again the wisdom of Ray Kelly and the NYPD in targeting Islamic extremism as a profound and continuing threat to New York and its citizens — all of its citizens, including thousands upon thousands of Muslims — and then acting accordingly.

Where was Kelly & Co. supposed to go to protect the city from Islamist terror — Lutheran quilting bees?

Roger L Simon wrote back to David Sirota, who hoped the bombers were white non-Muslims:

…what to do about Islam, an all-consuming ideology that seeks to engulf the world. The Sirotas of our culture want to downplay that but the reality remains.

Andrew Sullivan writes

That’s what I mean by a religious war. It’s war between the extremes of fundamentalist Islam and the free, secular West. That war can exist inside the mind of a single young fanatic who, merely with access to the web and guns and pressure cookers, can stop the world in its tracks. Or it can take the form of sectarian violence in Iraq.

My reader is correct that this is not reducible to Islam in all its breadth and complexity and history. But it cannot be understood at all without grasping the fundamentalist Jihadist mindset. The uncle of the two Jihadists could not be more emphatic that he as a Muslim feels utterly violated and offended by what these losers did. He says he feels ashamed. He is a Muslim as well. And he is an American through and through.

We have to make a simple distinction: between being a Muslim and being an apocalyptic self-proclaimed Jihadist. But the latter exist, are very real, and are inspired by a toxic distortion of Islam.

A reader writes:

Would you characterize Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and the militia movement they were associated with as being “at war” with the US? If anything, those men can be said to have been “at war” with EVERYONE, including the 19 children and hundreds of others that they murdered. These men and their ilk are murderers, not soldiers, and what they have done doesn’t deserve the dignity of cloaking it as some part of a larger ideological struggle. They killed because they could. Because they wanted to. And they are enemies of all humanity.

M. Zuhdi Jasser argues for more Muslim action:

Until most Muslims begin to harness our resources and our efforts to counter the ideology of Islamism and its attraction of vulnerable American Muslim youth and its pathway towards jihadization, we will continue to see youth ages 13 and up turn against us. The “morphine” of jihadism numbs their identity and drives them to destroy free societies. It infects them, dehumanizes their fellow Americans, and instructs them to commit acts of terrorism against their own — Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

As is often the case with Islamists, their radicalization is preceded by misogyny and a learned behavior that dehumanizes women and then all those who seek to be free. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested in 2009 for assault and battery against his girlfriend.

The warning signs in these two youths were obvious. But as a society that refuses to engage Islamism, we ignored them at our own peril.

Howie Carr has the last word:

“I know you’re not supposed to paint with a broad brush, unless you’re a liberal, in which case you are not only permitted, but expected to make Adam Lanza the poster boy for 100 million law-abiding legal gun owners.”

Such are the facts.