The beauty industry attracts people of all shapes and sizes. Women especially understand our society's obsession with physical beauty and maintaining it. We bond over shared beauty secrets and covet the latest, greatest beauty treatments. Beauty is something I love, and I share that love with my clients every day. Each woman, unique in their specific concerns and needs. It's a matter of trust I share with these women. A mutual respect for my expertise and the effectiveness of the products I recommend and the women who buy them. I take that relationship very seriously. Women are the biggest part of the formula for my success.
So I was quite struck by the interesting article I read this morning about the mother of both accused Boston Marathon Bombers, Zubeiat Tsarnaeva.
Zubeiat Tsarnaeva is a licensed aesthetician in MA, who worked from her 3rd floor familial apartment on Norfolk Street in Cambridge. Two of her longtime clients, Anne and Alyssa Kilzer of Belmont gave the
Boston Herald's Margery Eagan an interesting glimpse inside the family. Both mother and daughter were said to have been to the Cambridge apartment many, many times in the six years Zubeiat Tsarnaeva gave them facials. Daughter Alyssa found it hard not to refute the media claims of no one seeing "extremism or radicalism" in Bombing suspect #2, younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Incredibly, Alyssa claimed to have seen signs of radical extremism in their
mother:
"At one appointment, Tsarnaeva “started quoting a conspiracy theory, telling me how she thought 9/11 was purposely created by the American government to make Americans hate Muslims,” Alyssa 23, wrote on her blog of her visits to the apartment."
“I have to say I felt kind of scared and vulnerable when she said this, as I am distinctly American, and was lying practically naked in her living room.”
There has been lots of speculation in the media as to who or whom "radicalized" these brothers, who spent nearly all of their lives growing up Americans in Cambridge. There are those who question the Muslim community in Boston. Those who question the Internet influence; social media radical extremist groups and YouTube, and those who question the motives behind older brother Tamerlan's six month visit to Russia in the beginning of 2012. But the picture painted by Alyssa and her mother Anne is quite interesting, indeed.
Mother Anne talked about the immaculately clean apartment that Zubieat kept and about the time she and her daughters spent in close proximity with other family members. Zubieat, she said, would work on the mother and daughter in the living room while other Tsarnaev family members, who would sometimes argue, were in other rooms. Anne recalled her as "proud" and a "mother who worked hard and seemed close to her children." Anne Kilzer was one of the many who called police after recognizing the photo of the Tsarnaev brothers the FBI posted in the media in hopes of finding them.
She explained that 19 yr old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev presented himself as "helpful to his mother" and family and daughter Alyssa wrote:
"Alyssa also stated that Tsarnaeva’s two daughters, one about 18, were both in arranged marriages. When one daughter brought her baby home, Dzhokhar would look after the boy.
Sometimes, on congested Norfolk Street, he would also go down to put the visitor-parking pass on her car
window."
“Yes” she said, “I gave him my
car keys.”
"Once Tsarnaeva took the parking pass out but “first put on a hijab,”
Alyssa wrote, as she’d
become increasingly religious mentioning Allah and
the Koran between confessions of worry and
arguments involving her older son, Tamerlan."
Does this new information lend to the evidence that those boys were taught religious extremism at home? It very well could be, but it also very well could be that the brothers taught their mother that same religious extremism at home too. I'm not accusing anyone of anything here, but what I am saying is this:
A lot of the answers to all of the questions somehow must lie inside that 3rd floor apartment and the people who live there on Nolfolk Street in Cambridge.
