City University of New York Professor Ruth O’Brien complains in an op-ed that “too much force” had been used against Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by the police.

The College Fix offers this excerpt from her piece:

Now we have captured the two terrorists from Chechnya who come from the troubled region that is Muslim, but we cannot understand their motives, not yet.  And Obama encourages us to refrain.

This said, the mortuary pictures of the older brother of the two are extremely disturbing, raising questions as to whether the Boston Police Department captured him with too much force. I understand the explanation offered by Katharine Q. Seelye, William H. Rashbaum, and Michael Cooper.  Yet, it does not ring true.  A picture is worth a thousand words that will keep our ears ringing as we recoil from this photo.  Images have a way of searing themselves into our memory in a way that can’t be undone.  We have an emotional memory, not just a rational one that is exemplified by words.

While terrorism is about causing fear — again an emotion — we do have to account for our conduct in these extreme times when adrenaline is running high.

At my home, to at least offset this, we turn off all media.  I couldn’t believe my sons’ explanation when they got home about one brother running over the other one.  So I found a place to read about this, and I recoiled after seeing the picture.  Still, we all know that terrorism, like crime, “leads if it bleeds” with the established media.  The established media fixates on the domestic-violence or crime-of-passion aspect of terrorism, and it, too, inculcates more fear in all of us.

As an added bonus, she cites Karl Marx, too!

I do hope we all watch the cleanup or the damage control and hear the words Obama uttered – we should be careful not just to bracket the motives of these terrorists – but also make sure to remember that we are an immigrant nation.  I hope we are not an Uncouth Nation, as Andrei S. Markovits said so well in 2004 for the Public Square Book series.  And I hope we understand questions pertaining to The Veil, as Joan Wallach Scott explained in 2007.  And finally, I hope we understand why Karl Marx wrote On the Jewish Question, as Anne Norton writes in On the Muslim Question.