Lessons from Boston

Update #2: I have great deal of respect for Richard Fernandez and his opinions.

The second part of the response is that an outsourced, privatized jihad will probably be increasingly met by privatized security regime based on reputation. With the government unwilling to profile in a increasingly vulnerable public space some entrepreneurs may create members-only events where attendance is limited to pre-cleared individuals who pay to have themselves vetted.

I think this has merit.

UPDATE: There have been three more arrests of young people with heavy Russian accents near U Mass. They had a car, a BMW, with the license plate “terrorista #1. Photos at the link.

One jihadist is dead and the other is in custody. The younger bomber’s wounds have not been described so it is impossible to say if he will survive. The emergency is over and now it is time to think about why this happened. It now appears that both young men were long time residents of this country and, at least the younger was a citizen. Both had registered to vote, according to Nexis. The older brother was married with a child. His wife had converted to Islam and, according to reports yesterday, was wearing a full chador when she was taken from their home protesting about a male FBI agent handling a Muslim woman. She was lucky, as one commenter observed, that she was not strip searched as Chechen women have been prominent in terrorism cases in Russia, sometimes as suicide bombers wearing bomb belts.

The majority [of suicide bombers] are male, but a huge fraction — over 40 percent — are women. Although foreign suicide attackers are not unheard of in Chechnya, of the 42 for whom we can determine place of birth, 38 were from the Caucasus. Something is driving Chechen suicide bombers, but it is hardly global jihad.

I doubt the Times’ insistence on the absence of Islamist motives although Chechens have been at war with Russians for centuries. The suicide bomb is a common weapon for jihadists. The Palestinian “Mother of Martyrs” comes to mind.

Mariam Farhat, who said she wished she had 100 sons to die while attacking Israelis, died in a Gaza city hospital of health complications including lung ailments and kidney failure, health official Ashraf Al-Kidra said. She was 64.

The older brother visited Russia for six months, and may have then gone to other locations during the period, terror training camps, for example. The Russians later asked the FBI to interrogate him about the period.

FBI officials confirmed Friday that they questioned Tamerlan in 2011 at the request of the Russian government about possible connections to Chechen extremists. He was interviewed by the FBI in Boston, and the investigation found “no derogatory information.”

Given the PC tendencies of the FBI lately, how hard did they try ? Why was he not kept under some observation ? Lee Harvey Oswald is another example of the FBI’s failures in this regard. He did visit Dagestan and Chechnya with his father who threatened “hell to pay” if his other son was killed. The father’s politics may be interesting.

Although terrorists from the Caucasus have struck in Moscow and other parts of Russia, the conflict in the region has never led to attacks in other countries. One possible explanation for the Boston bombings, said Aslan Doukaev, an expert on the Caucasus who works for Radio Liberty in Prague, is that the brothers were motivated by radical jihadism, not Chechen separatism.

Exactly ! The older brother had posted radical views on social media suggesting radicalization.

The International Business Times reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI’s Suspect Number One for the Boston Marathon Massacre who died today after an early morning gun battle with police, was influenced by a radical Muslim cleric in Australia. Tsarnaev’s Youtube channel contains numerous links to videos featuring Feiz Mohammad.

Feiz Mohammad is a member of the fundamentalist Wahabi sect of Islam according to The Australian. In 2005, the police investigated Mohammad for his DVDs, the “Death Series” and “Signs of the Hour.” The Australian reports that the Australian Federal Police looked into whether the series broke sedition laws and incited violence. In the videos, Mohammad called Jews “pigs” and denounces non-Muslims as “kaffirs,” which he says is “the worst word ever written, a sign of infidelity, disbelief, filth, a sign of dirt.” He also called upon Muslim children to “put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom.”

Sounds familiar.

The Obama administration has been determined to ignore the problem of the domestic Islamic terrorist, like Major Hasan who shot up Fort Hood. That incident is still being called “workplace violence” and he has the army judicial system tied in knots over his recent beard growing.

The British newspapers, as usual much more complete in discussions of sensitive US issues like terrorism discuss the Chechen connection.

The report also shows him to have been very religious, and poorly integrated in the US. According to Hirn’s report, the Chechen once said: “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.” In 2009, Tsarnaev was reportedly arrested for assaulting his girlfriend. His aunt, who lives in Canada, told reporters on Friday that the elder brother had married and that the couple had a three-year-old daughter living in the US.

This in spite of statements that he wanted to join the US Olympic boxing team. Something doesn’t add up.

The US left has nearly developed a collective hernia trying to make this something other than Islamic terror.

We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile. The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.

It turns out two Muslim Chechens apparently inspired by jihadist videos and ideology turned on the country which welcomed them with open arms.

Just another Failed Eliminationist Narrative, for which there will be no apologies.

The clips from various sources are mildly amusing.

What will be the consequences of this incident ?

First, I think the immigration bill is dead. It was a poorly drafted attempt to bring 11 million Democrat voters to the polls. Republicans who supported it, including Marco Rubio, have badly damaged their careers. John McCain has no career so the consequences for him will be minimal.

This post on the bombers from the excellent Powerline blog has a nice summary.

It strikes me that the main lesson we should take away from the Boston Marathon massacre is the destructive potential of jihadist ideology in itself, apart from its manifestation in relatively large and well-organized groups like, most notably, al Qaeda. Doesn’t the fact that two guys like the Tsarnaev brothers can cause such destruction, and paralyze an entire metropolitan area, regardless of whether they had any direct association with al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, call into question the adequacy of a drones-over-Afghanistan strategy? And shouldn’t we at least consider, in the midst of a wide-ranging debate over immigration policy, whether more realistic immigration measures should be taken to limit the risk posed by home grown (or, as in this case, transplanted) terrorists?

Both of these conclusions strike me as important and unlikely to be part of the Obama strategy. This administration, and the Democratic Party in general is so committed to the “diversity” concept that has devastated England that they will resist measures to retire sanity to our policies.

To ameliorate and eventually solve such a… problem means dealing simultaneously with several deeply-rooted component ones: getting better intelligence on the terrorist networks in place in order to disrupt them; deporting known Muslim extremists already here; controlling and ultimately reducing immigration; replacing a failed multiculturalism with a common British culture and identity that encompasses immigrant identities as the American identity once did; and above all encouraging British Muslims to embrace Britishness as their principal political identity and thus to reject the Islamist vision of a world-wide caliphate. To achieve even one of these aims will be difficult. For instance, deporting known extremists would probably require either withdrawing Britain from international conventions on torture and asylum (extremely difficult) or getting the international community to re-write them (impossible.) To achieve all of them will be a heroic task.

The task has not even been attempted by the Conservative government and the Republicans show little enthusiasm. We are probably entering an era of repeated terrorist outrages that will be minimized as a national security threat until another big one like 9/11 occurs.