International Relations as Depicted by Cats

link - walt on waltz

From Reuters:

MOSCOW, April 19 (Reuters) - The Russian-installed leader of Chechnya criticized U.S. police on Friday for killing an ethnic Chechen suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing and blamed the violence on his upbringing in the United States.
“The root of evil should be looked for in the United States,” Ramzan Kadyrov said in comments posted online after the police shot dead Tamerlan Tsarnaev and hunted for his brother Dzhokhar, his suspected accomplice.
“They (the brothers) grew up and studied in the United States and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there,” Kadyrov said. “Any attempt to make a connection between Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs is in vain.”
Kadyrov, a tough pro-Kremlin leader whose security services have been accused of human rights abuses such as kidnappings and torture, questioned why the U.S. police had not been able to arrest Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
“Apparently the special services needed a result by whatever means to appease society,” he said.

MOSCOW, April 19 (Reuters) - The Russian-installed leader of Chechnya criticized U.S. police on Friday for killing an ethnic Chechen suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing and blamed the violence on his upbringing in the United States.

“The root of evil should be looked for in the United States,” Ramzan Kadyrov said in comments posted online after the police shot dead Tamerlan Tsarnaev and hunted for his brother Dzhokhar, his suspected accomplice.

“They (the brothers) grew up and studied in the United States and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there,” Kadyrov said. “Any attempt to make a connection between Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs is in vain.”

Kadyrov, a tough pro-Kremlin leader whose security services have been accused of human rights abuses such as kidnappings and torture, questioned why the U.S. police had not been able to arrest Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

“Apparently the special services needed a result by whatever means to appease society,” he said.

On Boston.

Hey, everyone. I’d just like to take a moment away from the usual for some words on the bombing in Boston, and some of the responses I’ve been seeing on social media sites. There have been numerous posts that’ve brushed off the bombing with other tragedies that range from the tangentially related to the utterly inane. I get bringing up the bombings in Iraq that have so far killed dozens, days before the vote there. Or the atrocities that scar entire communities on a daily basis, mostly outside the West. Drones are a stretch, although I get the link to hellfire missiles. Western imperialism is where things start to get ridiculous. However, regardless of the strength of the association, I find the reasoning behind it all to be crass and absurd. Such a zero-sum game of comparative suffering is not only ridiculously insensitive but strategically self-mutilating.