In this pursuit no idiocy is unthinkable. Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, who is trying 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.”
The solution, then, is not to “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.
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 draconian immigration laws); one of the brothers 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 the demonization of 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 such comparisons were to be made it would have to be acknowledged that there is a second-generation (though strictly speaking these two were first generation) time bomb implanted. That means one can expect many more attacks like this. But will anyone make that point?
Their normality will be used to make them seem…normal, their motive inexplicable. But on the contrary it is their very apparent normality, their seeming assimilation into American life, which makes the situation so scary.
What about their mosque and other contacts in the Muslim community? Why didn’t they get an anti-extremist indoctrination there, an explanation of what Islam really is about? They attended a Muslim Brotherhood sponsored mosque (but that won’t be said) 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 even as it hosted 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: the story is now circulating that one of the brothers was thrown out of his mosque for being too radical. Then, there are all the denunciations of the terror attack by Islamist front groups. The New 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 say 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.
And of course there is the troubled youth angle to 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.
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 Hassan/Fort Hood case. Doing so is bad for their careers and reputation, as well as being sometimes counter to their ideology.