The superb work of our law-enforcement officials in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing ignited a blaze of self-congratulation that obscured the event’s implications.
Yeah, we killed one fanatic and nabbed the other. But our dysfunctional system couldn’t prevent this latest Boston Massacre.
That carnage was a dirt-cheap terrorist triumph. Fanatics will take its lessons to their shriveled jihadi hearts:
Lesson No. 1: Two amateur terrorists can paralyze a major American city for days. The Tsarnaev punks generated global headlines, ran up millions in government expenses, punished a major metro-area economy and disrupted society. And now we’ve got a costly civilian trial to come for the surviving brother — with more headlines to inspire copycats.
Reuters
The pain remains: A man kneeling yesterday at the makeshift memorial on Boylston Street, shortly after Boston observed a moment of silence for the victims.
We’re relieved that the two young terrorists were “brought to justice” and delude ourselves that we “won.” Uh-uh. At the cost of two expendable young thugs, a few guns and a couple of homemade bombs, radical Islam generated a bloodbath that created genuine terror on our soil.
Al Qaeda and its ilk have long used suicide bombers and doomed assassins to rupture societies in the Middle East, killing tens of thousands of Muslims (a fact we fail to exploit in our lame “information campaigns”). Now the Islamists are in the export business. Expect more of these low-cost, high-return missions within our borders.
Lesson No. 2: The best weapons against targets in the US are disaffected legal immigrants or radicalized native-born converts to jihad. Political correctness — a pathetic fanaticism of our own — and legal paralysis make it virtually impossible to stop legal residents such as the Tsarnaev brothers before they commit a crime.
The FBI questioned Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother, after the Russians asked us to look into his radicalization. (Moscow’s murky role is another story.) It appears that the agents asked him, Are you a Muslim fanatic? To which he replied,No. End of investigation.
Get inside the red-white-and-blue tent legally, and you, the terrorist, have a license to kill.
Lesson No. 3: Our immigration system is one of terrorism’s best allies. Related to the last point, this is a case of just how idiotic a politically correct bureaucracy can be. The father of the Tsarnaev punks only had to declare himself an asylum-seeker afraid for his life in the Russian Federation and our consular officials fell all over themselves to get him to America.
Nobody cared that “fearful” Pops retained his Russian citizenship and passport, then voluntarily returned to Daghestan, a jihad-roiled Russian province, to live. Or that his elder son’s dream vacation appears to have been a terrorist training session.
If you’re a highly educated, ambitious West European who wants to become an American, your chances are near zero. If you’re a radical America-hater from a hostile region, all you have to do is shout that you’re a political refugee and we’ll give you residency and benefits.
There’s no reason that anyone from Chechnya should be granted a US visa. It’s a gangster mini-state (within the Russian Federation) at war with home-grown Islamists. There are no good guys. Chechnya’s sole export besides terror, Chechen mafiosi, make Mexican drug cartels look like Franciscans. And some of the cruelest jihadis our troops faced in Iraq and elsewhere were Chechens who joined al Qaeda.
Lesson No. 4: The more open a society, the more targets it presents. We all failed to see the obvious. Obsessing about attacks on the Super Bowl and other facilities-bound events, we missed the appeal of public displays, such as marathons, as targets: 26 miles of vulnerability, tens of thousands of (mixed sex, scantily clad!) runners and hundreds of thousands of spectators.
We’ve done a good job of protecting hard targets, from stadiums to government offices. But that only deflected the fanatics toward softer targets whose very randomness creates authentic terror. And don’t underestimate the appeal of butchering female athletes, who are almost as terrifying to Islamists as girls in bikinis.
You won’t hear that last point from our politically correct authorities or our “experts.” But Freud has more to tell us about Islamist terrorists than any think tank. My suggestion to the feds, if they want to understand why Tamerlan Tsarnaev turned to jihad? Check out this wife-beater’s love life. Scratch a terrorist, find a lonesome perv.
Last week, Islamist fanaticism scored a resounding victory on the cheap. The effectiveness of our manhunt didn’t change that.
Ralph Peters is the author of the forthcoming Civil-War novel “Hell or Richmond.”
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