Make No Mistake, It Was Jihad
By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY
If your concern about the threat posed by the Tsarnaev brothers is limited to assuring that they will never be in a position to repeat their grisly acts, rest easy.
The elder, Tamerlan—apparently named for the 14th-century Muslim conqueror famous for building pyramids of his victims' skulls to commemorate his triumphs over infidels—is dead. The younger, Dzhokhar, will stand trial when his wounds heal, in a proceeding where the most likely uncertainty will be the penalty. No doubt there will be some legal swordplay over his interrogation by the FBI's High-Value Interrogation Group without receiving Miranda warnings. But the only downside for the government in that duel is that his statements may not be used against him at trial. This is not much of a risk when you consider the other available evidence, including photo images of him at the scene of the bombings and his own reported confession to the victim whose car he helped hijack during last week's terror in Boston.
But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and what they represent, then worry—a lot.
For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was finally put in place by the FBI after so-called underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.
At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, and other self-proclaimed spokesmen for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?
Will we see another performance like the Army's after-action report following Maj.Nidal Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout "allahu akhbar"—a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as "workplace violence"? If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army's diversity program.
Presumably the investigation into the Boston terror attack will include inquiry into not only the immediate circumstances of the crimes but also who funded Tamerlan Tsarnaev's months-long sojourn abroad in 2012 and his comfortable life style. Did he have a support network? What training did he, and perhaps his younger brother, receive in the use of weapons? Where did the elder of the two learn to make the suicide vest he reportedly wore? The investigation should include as well a deep dive into Tamerlan's radicalization, the Islamist references in the brothers' social media communications, and the jihadist websites they visited.
Will the investigation probe as well the FBI's own questioning of Tamerlan two years ago at the behest of an unspecified foreign government, presumably Russia, over his involvement with jihadist websites and other activities? Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Leon Bledsoe), who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn't count Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.
If the intelligence yielded by the FBI's investigation is of value, will that value be compromised when this trial is held, as it almost certainly will be, in a civilian court? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers, as they have every right to do, will seek to discover that intelligence and use it to fashion a case in mitigation if nothing else, to show that his late brother was the dominant conspirator who had access to resources and people.
There is also cause for concern in that this was obviously a suicide operation—not in the direct way of a bomber who kills all his victims and himself at the same time by blowing himself up, but in the way of someone who conducts a spree, holding the stage for as long as possible, before he is cut down in a blaze of what he believes is glory. Here, think Mumbai.
Until now, it has been widely accepted in law-enforcement circles that such an attack in the U.S. was less likely because of the difficulty that organizers would have in marshaling the spiritual support to keep the would-be suicide focused on the task. That analysis went out the window when the Tsarnaevs followed up the bombing of the marathon by murdering a police officer in his car—an act certain to precipitate the violent confrontation that followed.
It has been apparent that with al Qaeda unable to mount elaborate attacks like the one it carried out on 9/11, other Islamists have stepped in with smaller and less intricate crimes, but crimes that are nonetheless meant to send a terrorist message. These include Faisal Shahzad, who failed to detonate a device in Times Square in 2010, and would-be subway bomber Najibullah Zazi and his confederates.
Is this, as former CIA Director Michael Hayden put it, the new normal?
There is also cause for concern in the president's reluctance, soon after the Boston bombing, even to use the "t" word—terrorism—and in his vague musing on Friday about some unspecified agenda of the perpetrators, when by then there was no mystery: the agenda was jihad.
For five years we have heard, principally from those who wield executive power, of a claimed need to make fundamental changes in this country, to change the world's—particularly the Muslim world's—perception of us, to press "reset" buttons. We have heard not a word from those sources suggesting any need to understand and confront a totalitarian ideology that has existed since at least the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.
The ideology has regarded the United States as its principal adversary since the late 1940s, when a Brotherhood principal, Sayid Qutb, visited this country and was aghast at what he saw as its decadence. The first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, al Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, and those in the dozen years since—all were fueled by Islamist hatred for the U.S. and its values.
There are Muslim organizations in this country, such as the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, headed by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, that speak out bravely against that totalitarian ideology. They receive no shout-out at presidential speeches; no outreach is extended to them.
One of the Tsarnaev brothers is dead; the other might as well be. But if that is the limit of our concern, there will be others.
Mr. Mukasey served as attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009 and as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York from 1988 to 2006.
A version of this article appeared April 22, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Make No Mistake, It Was Jihad.
And here is another important POV from Barry Rubin.
And here is another important POV from Barry Rubin.
‘Mysterious Motive’: Cover-Up of Boston Attack’s ‘Why’ Begins
Now that the two (primary, at least) terrorists from the Boston Marathon attack have been killed or captured, we enter a new phase in which the dominant politically correct, factually incorrect forces try to explain away the attack.
Can this be done? Will they really try? Well, yes. True, as one of my correspondents remarked, it is much easier to obfuscate distant Benghazi than a total shutdown and horror in the middle of a major American city. Yet the spin-masters are already at work.
The first step must be, in part, a stalling technique — but it sets the pattern for what is to come. The motive must be obfuscated — this Reuters piece, “Boston Marathon Bombing Investigation Turns to Motive,” is a good start. The article spends seven paragraphs discussing the parents’ claim that the two brothers were framed.
This suggests that mass media and politicians will not shrink from suggesting — perhaps I should say “giving fair hearing” — to bizarre conspiracy theories and doubts. People shouldn’t believe these completely, is the theme, but you just can’t be too sure that two young Muslims would have any reason to harm Americans. There are now witnesses who heard the two terrorists’ mother claiming that September 11 was a U.S. plot to make people hate Muslims.
That’s where playing with that kind of fire leads.
In the Reuters article, the word “Islam” is not mentioned except to say that the two once lived in one predominantly Muslim country, and that another place they lived, Dagestan, is “a southern Russian province that lies at the heart of a violent Islamist insurgency.” Here, we have another technique: minimize Islam as a factor, and turn it into background noise.
Obviously, this will not apply completely, both because the elephant in the room is too big, and there is still some journalistic integrity in places. Both the Washington Post and Mother Jones took a lead in exposing the YouTube likes of one of the terrorists, which showed a preference for al-Qaeda views — to say the least.
There are a lot of other quivers in the arsenal of denial, however. On Face the Nation, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said he had no idea why the Tsarnaev brothers would target ”innocent men, women, and children in the way that these two fellows did.”
The answer — of course — is that these people were not regarded as innocent at all, but as soldiers in the alleged Christian-Jewish war on Islam. This, of course, is precisely the same thinking that has been produced by Islamists for decades. Might September 11, 2001, be a clue for Patrick?
Of course, for Patrick to say that at this point in the investigation is understandable on one level: as a refusal by a government official to remark on an ongoing investigation, which is a relief from the president’s past remarks that the police acted “stupidly” with professor Henry Louis Gates and “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Yet what if Patrick’s claim is sustained, week after week, until the heat is off?
NBC News has just reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had visited an Islamist radical six times at a mosque in Dagestan. The Caucasian/Chechen angle offers some hope for successful obfuscation, as a lot of media time can be spent talking about that conflict. [Christian Science Monitor, it isn't Islam but a Chechen tribal code of honor.]
Of course, if the young men were acting as Chechens and not as Islamists they would have attacked a Russian target. The United States has not — even by the usual stretch of radical Islamist imagination — had anything to do with the conflict in Chechnya.
The more compelling the conflict in Chechnya is as a source of pain and passion, the less compelling the argument that the conflict was a motive. The Russians have indeed been brutal in suppressing the rebellion, far more than the West or Israel has acted toward anyone. So what cause overrides that one?
Yet Chechen grievances will be a good topic for obfuscation.
Be sure that soon, there will also be a frantic attempt at the “blame ourselves” theme. If the issue wasn’t such a tragic one, this would be humorous. Could America have acted more kindly toward these two brothers? Nevertheless, do not underestimate how well this theme will play with citizens who drink similar flavors of Kool-Aid.
In this pursuit of obfuscation, no idiocy is unthinkable. Canadian Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau, attempting to be an Obama clone, explained:
There is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war … with society.
His solution, then:
[Do not] marginalize people even further who already feel like they are enemies of society rather than people who have hope for the future.
In other words, doing anything is more dangerous than doing nothing. To combat radical Islam is to hurt people’s feelings, and that will produce more terrorism.
The brotherly duo — and their family — was treated extraordinarily well by the country they betrayed. They were allowed in, rather questionably, as permanent residents, and suddenly large numbers of relatives were in the United States as well (so much for our supposed draconian immigration laws). One of the brothers even became a citizen.
They went to the best schools. What did they learn there about the greatness of America? Was the seed of rage fertilized by U.S. education’s tendency to demonize American history as evil, greedy, racist, and imperialist?
One of them even got a scholarship.
It is vital to understand the profound difference between these two and the September 11 hijackers, men who came on a mission of sabotage and murder. They reached the U.S. shore as enemies, reliable agents of revolutionary retribution. These two young men, however, had a free choice. They had to actively close their minds to everything good they experienced and to adopt an ideology of hate. Only a very powerful force could move them in that direction.
We have seen this frequently in the United Kingdom and France.
Guess what? If comparisons are to be made to the 9/11 terrorists, it would have to be acknowledged that there is a second-generation (though, strictly speaking, these two are first generation) time bomb implanted with these two brothers — implying that we can expect many more attacks like this.
But will anyone add on that point?
The brothers’ otherwise normal activities will be used to make them seem … normal, their motive inexplicable. But on the contrary: it is their apparent normality, their seeming assimilation into American life, which makes the situation so scary.
Of course, a key argument is that Islam has nothing to do with this, and that Islamism isn’t directly behind it. A new theme that is being used by a lot of obfuscators: Muslims view “Islamic” terrorists the same way Christians view the Westboro Baptist Church.
Here is a positive evaluation of that quote which explains that the idea there is much support among Muslims for terrorism comes merely “from the Vast Right Wing Echo Chamber” — then, the author changes the argument to say the claim is that the Boston terrorists “are representative of all Muslims everywhere. It’s a ridiculous double standard.” In other words, the terrorists in Boston and everywhere else don’t represent much of anything but themselves.
As I recall, the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t govern ten countries.
But you don’t want to be a right-wing nut, do you? Then don’t say that the Boston attack arose from an ideology of Islamism, or link it to the thousands of other such recent attacks around the world.
The truth: American Muslims themselves do not agree that support for terrorism is minimal in their community.
In 2011, 21 percent of all American Muslims — and a higher number, 32 percent, of U.S.-born Muslims — thought there is a great deal or fair amount of support for terrorism among them.
Why is the number of U.S.-born Muslims who believe this so much higher? Because they tend to be younger people who are more in contact with social media, and with people like the two young Boston bombers.
What about the Boston terrorists’ mosque and their other contacts in the Muslim community? Why didn’t they get an anti-extremist indoctrination there, an explanation of what Islam is all about? They attended a Muslim Brotherhood-sponsored mosque — shhh! — and the Boston Muslim religious leadership is full of extremists, the evidence of which has long been available.
The mosque even received a subsidy from Boston, despite hosting anti-American speakers who made the precise arguments used to rationalize terrorism.
We won’t be hearing much about these issues though. Well, except for two aspects: a story is now circulating that one of the brothers was thrown out of his mosque for being too radical.
We will also see denunciations of the terror attack by Islamist front groups. TheNew York Times article on motive cited these statements three times. I believe that groups like CAIR do not support the Boston attack or al-Qaeda, but they support many other terrorist attacks, and they support the ideology and set of beliefs on which the Boston attack is based. That’s why so many associated with CAIR, even on a senior level, have become involved in anti-American terrorism.
Having followed this issue for many years: I have never heard of a single anti-radicalization program conducted by any mosque or “mainstream” Islamic group. Real moderates are isolated, vilified, denied media attention, and even forced out of local mosques.
In a 2011 Pew poll, fully half of American Muslims said their leaders aren’t doing enough to fight extremism. That last point can safely be used as a certified non-“Islamophobic” argument about where much of the problem lies — but it won’t be.
Of course, the troubled youth angle will be played to the fullest. Yes, the tribulations of young adulthood and adolescence are factors, but only inasmuch as it makes them vulnerable to systematic indoctrination. In other words, their specific psychology and even personal experiences are not the motive any more than the childhood of a professional hit-man for the Mafia is.
It is also possible to fall back on the idea that determining the motive is impossible or irrelevant — there’s just too much stuff out there, dude. In the words of Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University:
The individual, particular motivations of the perpetrators have little significance since there are multiple grievances out there and, in the Islamic world, there is free-floating angst.
That statement was too much even for Bill Maher.
Another angle will be the growing story of governmental incompetence in using intelligence to stop terrorists. In part, this is unfair since there have also been many successes. A more important issue is why government officials, politicians, army officers, academics, and journalists fear to point out the truth: look at the Nidal Hasan/Fort Hood attack. Pointing out the truth is bad for their careers and reputations, as well as sometimes counter to their own ideologies.
Obfuscators also use the partisan argument, made most memorably by a journalist who openly hoped the terrorists would be white right-wingers.
There is an unnoticed dimension here: if the attack is seen as a political defeat, it cannot be a learning experience. The question isn’t “does this attack tell us something important about the real world?”, but: “How can we explain it away so we don’t suffer a setback in the effort to fundamentally transform America into a just, non-racist society?”
And so they will claim that, in a sense, white right-wingers — or at least the kind of policies they would endorse — did cause the Boston attack. America was mean to these kids, it is aggressive in other countries, and counter-terrorist protection was reduced by budget cuts.
In other words: lying, concealing, and misleading become defined as virtuous. As Trudeau said, talking honestly about revolutionary Islamism would be to inspire more racism and terrorism.
Finally, there is the “full admission” fallback argument — on which Obama’s foreign policy is based. Sure, it was those evil SOBs, al-Qaeda, but the other Islamists are relatively good, so we have to promote them into power since only they can counter the “bad” Islamists.
That’s why Obama claims Islamist governments in Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey are good for you. Indeed, Secretary of State John Kerry, in Turkey, compared Americans’ feelings about the Boston attack to Turkish feelings about the killing of jihadis engaged in supporting a terrorist group (Hamas) who attacked Israeli soldiers during the Gaza flotilla incident.
This should not be seen merely as a clumsy statement, but as dangerous, revealing stupidity. It is dangerous because it tells Muslims that they are equally the victims of “our” terrorism; it is revealing because the context shows the equation of all violence, no matter what the cause, that reinforces such thinking.
A U.S. attack on terrorists in Yemen, Afghanistan, or elsewhere then becomes “anti-Muslim violence” that justifies the next terror attack in an American city.
Former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw explained that American drones were killing innocent people, and this led to rage against the “presumptuousness of the United States.”
In an honest discussion it must be considered what U.S. policy factors lead to terrorism. But now there is the transfer to America of the old “cycle of violence” argument about the Middle East. Terrorists murder Israeli civilians or fire rockets at Israel, Israel defends itself, and the two events are treated as indistinguishable.
Defending yourself offends people.
The proper response: denounce the terrorists and the ideology of terrorism, and proclaim the right of focused self-defense, which means doing everything possible to retaliate against those responsible and not citizens of another country chosen at random.
The American secretary of state, a leading Canadian politician, journalists, and others are thus rationalizing in advance more such attacks.
They will get their “wish,” and then explain away the next event as more proof of their worldview.
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