Terrorism analysts are rebutting President Obama’s assertion that the “scale of the threat” from Islamic terrorists has reverted to pre-Sept. 11, 2001, levels.
“This is a total fabrication,” said Steven Emerson, whose Investigative Project on Terrorism tracks radical Islam. “The ‘scale of this threat’ in the 1990s never closely resembled the terrorist attacks post 9/11. This is an outright lie.”
The Heritage Foundation has been cataloguing foiled terror attacks post-9/11 by Islamic groups. The number: 54.
James Carafano, a military analyst at Heritage, said the 1990s’ numbers “were a fraction of that.”
Mr. Obama on Thursday delivered a speech at the National Defense University that came close to declaring victory over al Qaeda, saying it is now operating franchise groups.
He also declared an end to the global campaign against terrorism, saying the U.S. would focus on individual cells.
“As we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11,” the president said.
Before the Boston Marathon bombing, allegedly conducted by two jihadists, the U.S. was the target of at least five Muslim attacks since 2009 (two of which succeeded) whose plots went undetected by the FBI or CIA:
In separate attacks a month apart, Islamist terrorists made it clear that they believed they acted in the name of their religion, exacting vengeance for their fellow Muslims. Yet several media pockets have gone into overdrive to deflect attention from that Islamist motivation.
Still carrying the weapons that killed British soldier Lee James Rigby in his bloody hands, Michael Adebolajo explained why he attacked an unarmed man on a London street Wednesday: “We swear by Almighty Allah, we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. The only reasons we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We apologize that woman had to see this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.”
The New York Timesomitted reference to the attacker’s invocation of Allah, relegating it to page A7. ABC, NBC and CBS similarly omitted the Islamic reference.
Media Matters for America went further, accusing Fox News of “Islamophobia,” for comments about the attackers’ motivations. The liberal organization made no reference to the attackers’ own words, but emphasized condemnations of the attack from British Muslim leaders. Commentator Michelle Malkin was singled out in the Media Matters post for saying the videotaped attacker was “quoting chapter and verse, sura and verse, from the Quran the justification for beheading an innocent solider there, and of course they’ve targeted civilians as well.”
In fact, that’s exactly what Adebolajo did at 1:15 of the graphic video below.
“But we are forced by the Qur’an, in Sura At-Tawba, through many ayah in the Qu’ran, we must fight them as they fight us,” he says.
Yet Media Matters cites Malkin’s comments as an example of Fox’s “Islamophobia.”
Following the Boston bombing last month, not even the discovery jihadist propaganda on Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s YouTube channel and other social media platforms was enough to convince some media liberals that the he and his brother Dzhokhar were motivated by religion. Instead they chose to look for other more secular explanations such as Chechen nationalism or disillusionment with U.S. foreign policy.
Hours after Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s names became public, The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber penned a column titled “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” in which she suggested pinning the Muslim label on them reduced them to being “caricatures” and “whitewashed” their humanity.
Had the bombers been white right-wing extremists like Timothy McVeigh chances are that Garber would not have called for tolerance and suggested using a label made them into “caricatures” or demeaned them.
Not to be outdone, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert charged that Fox News was engaged in a “war on Islam,” a conspiratorial, delusionary and incendiary narrative that Canadian intelligence says is the leading cause of radicalization among young Muslims.
Boehlert has consistently ignored the treatment of women as second-class citizens and the imposition of the death penalty on homosexuals in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iran.
He has also routinely uncritically echoed the radical Islamist narrative pushed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and other groups. In turn, they have frequently cited his work in their own defense.
The Media Matters senior fellow has defended Islamic extremists such as Sami Al-Arian, a Florida professor who pleaded guilty in 2006 of aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, accusing his detractors of “sloppy journalism” and of having a “pervasive anti-Arab bias.”
Boehlert also defended Islamic charities in a March 22 blog written after a biography about Fox CEO Roger Ailes showed that Ailes compared the charities to terrorist organizations. In fact, numerous Muslim charities have been shut down and prosecuted due to their support for terrorist groups. The Holy Land Foundation had been the largest Muslim charity in the United States before being convicted of routing more than $12 million to Hamas.
According to a Foreign Policy magazine article published in February, the involvement of Islamic charities in terrorist fundraising continues.
Boehlert refuses to use the term Islam and terrorism in the same sentence. Yet he had no such qualms about using the terms “right-wing” and “terrorist” in the same sentence following the Boston bombing to falsely describe Fox News’s supposed inattention to white supremacist violence during an April 29 interview on Current TV.
“When a right-wing nut, an extremist goes on shooting rampages, the response is how do they possibly stop a lunatic?” Boehlert said. “When a Muslim is accused of an act of terror, Fox News definitely knows how to stop the lunatic, and they are definitely interested in assigning political blame.”
This came six days after reports indicated that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told his interrogators that he and his brother, as NBC reported, “were motivated by a desire to defend Islam because of ‘the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.’”
That has since been reinforced by reports about Dzhokhar’s note, scrawled inside the boat he was captured in on the night of April 19. “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” he wrote.
Boehlert has yet to acknowledge a religious motivation for the Boston bombings.
Major General Michael Nagata is the Deputy Director for Special Operations/Counterterrorism on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While that position represents many years of distinguished accomplishment in the military for which he should be congratulated, consider these 10 rather undistinguished words, for which he should be chastised, that he offered to the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 16, 2013:
“The United States is not at war with an idea….”
I am very sorry to say that an otherwise splendid warrior who would declare this represents a highly disturbing sign that the Jihadi Salafist strategy has achieved a significant goal: blinding our highest officials to the threat Jihadis pose to our freedoms.
If I were Commander-in-Chief for a day, I would assign the General to KP for that statement. I’d then order a homework assignment – that he give me a book report, first, on the stellar “Future Jihad – Terrorist Strategies Against America” by Dr. Walid Phares. I’d also ask for reports on the many excellent seminars presented to CENTCOM, SOCOM; and on the internal analyses and publications made available to US Special Forces and considered as strategic consensus over the past decade. Then, I would require him to explain why the ideas in Chapter 9 of “Future Jihad”, and other similar books by experts who testified to the US Congress over several years, do not leap from their pages with clarity on the origins of Boston foot-dragging, or the scrubbed Benghazi Talking Points, or the misdirection of the video patsy, the tentative Department of Defense response to Islamist violence against Americans at an ill-protected Libyan Potemkin Village or the outrage and horror of the machete attack in London this past Wednesday. The ideas on which we should declare war, or at least strategize our confrontation to the ideology of al Qaeda and its allies and supporters, are the six Jihadi strategic ideas. They are economic, ideological, political, intelligence, subversive, and diplomatic.
Two years into the seismic shift that brought the forces of Islamic jihad and Sharia law to power in country after country in the Middle East and North Africa — with the astonishing and extensive assistance from the U.S. — Iran, Hizballah and al-Qa’eda apparently judge that the U.S. and its Western allies still need another nudge to ensure their complete retreat from “Muslim” lands. That nudge, according to independent, reliable and mutually-corroborating sources, has now been prepared by this Axis.
Indicators and warnings continue to grow concerning the resurgence of an “Axis of Jihad” comprised of Iran, Hizballah, and al-Qa’eda. This axis is not new: its three actors, both national and sub-national, have been working together in an operational terror alliance for over two decades. Still, so many seem unaware not just of this alliance, but of the ideological bonds that brought them together in Khartoum, Sudan, in the early 1990s and have kept them together to the current day. The bond is as old as Islam, and includes the commitment to jihad [war in the name of Islam] and Islamic Shariah law; the threat is to all free and democratic societies which stand in the way of global Islamic government and the forcible application of Islamic Shariah Law.
Foundation of the Axis of Jihad
This modern-day Axis of Jihad was formed in the Sudan under the aegis of the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Omar al-Bashir and his sometime political ally, National Congress Party chairman Hassan al-Turabi. Al-Qa’eda as such had not yet taken its current form, but after the end of the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviet Union, Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had found safe haven in the Sudan. Al-Bashir and Turabi are pan-Islamists, meaning they see the world in terms of the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam, where Shariah is enforced) versus the Dar al-Harb (everywhere that is not under Islamic Law). Such a worldview chooses to disregard the ancient intra-Islamic schism between Sunni and Shi’a and instead to unify the entire Islamic world in jihad against the “infidel.”
So it was that al-Bashir and Turabi invited the Iranian regime leadership and its Hizballah terror proxies to Khartoum in late 1990 to meet with the future leadership of al-Qa’eda. Then-Iranian president (and once again a 2013 candidate for the office) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, intelligence director Ali Fallahian, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohsen Reza’i and other top Iranian leadership figures accepted al-Bashir’s invitation and traveled to Khartoum, along with Islamic jihadis from around the region.
There, and in subsequent meetings that took place in Khartoum throughout the early 1990s, the alliance was formed among Iran, Hizballah, and what soon would be known as al-Qa’eda. Usama bin Laden was especially interested in the explosives expertise coupled with a “martyrdom” mentality he had seen demonstrated by Hizballah with such deadly effect against Western targets. It was arranged that Imad Mughniyeh, Hizballah’s top terror operative, would commit to training Usama bin Laden’s growing cadre of terrorists in explosives techniques, especially those involving suicide truck bombings that could bring down large buildings. Training camps were set up in Sudan, Lebanon, and elsewhere where al-Qa’eda’s would-be shahid recruits could learn this craft. The attacks at Khobar Towers, the U.S. East Africa Embassies in Dar Es-Salaam and Nairobi, against the USS Cole, and eventually the 9/11 attacks themselves were all the result of this terror alliance.
Countries all over the world have taken hold of the idea of ‘appeasement’ from the 1930’s and made it their policy regarding radical Islam. Western nations are the anthill and Islam the magnifying glass in the sun; where they cast their glance, people cower in fear.
This embarrassing fear has led to such ideas as: the presentation of a global ban on insults to Muhammad at the UN General Assembly as recently as September, 2012, the blame and subsequent incarceration of an American citizen because he insulted Islam in a movie which was used as an excuse for riots in the Middle East and the murder of a US diplomat in Benghazi, and the UN and Obama’s belief that the answer to the constant rocket attacks, threats of destruction, murder of Israeli civilians, and possible third Arab Intifada in Judea and Samaria is to simply give them what they want: more Israeli land, a Palestinian state, and other concessions which will lead to the eventual destruction of all Western nations.
Twenty years ago these ideas would have been laughed at by the media and the general populace, not thought of as great ideas to achieve peace. Would al-Qaeda have stopped after 9/11 if in response America had given them a portion of California to create their own state?
It seems that the world’s policy is to merely mitigate the destructive nature that is Islamic extremism, rather than cure the world of this infectious disease. We celebrated when a report shows that less Israelis were murdered this year than at the same time last year or when only one act of terrorism occurred during the entire month of January.
When did murder and destruction become the status quo in the Middle East? Why is the world more focused on the poor Palestinian refugees that never were and less on the families that are being slain in their beds by extremists?
The countries of the world seem content with slowing the rate of death and destruction caused by Muslim extremists and show no concern over a future where Islamic ideas have spread so far and have become so deeply rooted that it is too late to act. This is the reality that we face today.
Too long have the Western countries shown fear in the face of the enemy, too long has the only peaceful Western-friendly country in the Middle East been told it cannot defend itself, and too long has there been the attempted appeasement of an enemy that needs to be destroyed rather than given concessions.
Appeasement does not work. This was shown when Hitler understood the policy of appeasement to be a weakness and continued on his path of murder and destruction until it was almost too late for the entire world. This is where the world is headed again. Islamic extremists have rooted themselves in communities across the globe. Soon the riots will spread from the Middle East to all over Europe and the US, as they already have, yet this time there will not be any way to stop them.
The extremists have learned a very valuable lesson: kill a few Americans, kill a few Israelis, and the world will do nothing but bend its knee and beg for you to stop. The extremists attack and murder innocent civilians, yet there is no response due to the fear that the extremists will retaliate. The world’s response has been weak, if not nonexistent.
Islamic extremism is the weed that needs to be plucked from the garden before it spreads and destroys all that is held dear. The Western nations have a decision to make: strike back at the heart of the beast that bares it’s fangs to the world, or continue to fruitlessly appease and risk becoming an Islamic nation themselves.
Last month, Canadian authorities prevented Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser from committing an Islamic terror attack that involved derailing a VIA passenger train.There is no telling how high the death toll would have been had they been successful. Thankfully, they were not.
The left-wing media would have you believe that Islam is not what motivated these two ‘lone wolves’. That westerners don’t seem all that interested in finding out – largely because failed terror attacks rarely get people to look up from their smart phones – is part of the problem.
In addition to Esseghaier’s facebook page revealing an Al-Qaeda flowchart and a photo of Bin Laden, his favorites included the likes of Abu Mus’ab Zarkawi, the guy many believe personally beheaded Nicholas Berg in Iraq.
Now it’s being reported that a third ‘lone wolf’ may have been part of the Esseghaier / Jaser pack. Ahmed Abassi was arrested in New York and apparently had plans to perpetrate a separate attack, designed to kill 100,000 people.
Acting like a weapon of mass destruction, a Tunisian Jihadist is accused by US authorities of planning to poinson thousands of Americans. As usual, the debate about lone wolf or not, and who radicalized him and so on, surges. By now, precedents and global analysis shows that every Jihadist is indoctrinated by someone. There are no exceptions. Every Jihadist is either recruited or recruits itself to some group. That is not what worries me in my analysis, it is the type of attacks the latest Jihadists are selecting. Most of the targets are mass casulaties types and frequency of attemps is higher.
Since my book ‘Future Jihad’ of 2005, I have challenged the ‘Lone Wolf’ assertion raised by many in the mainstream academia, media and among ‘consultants’ to Government. There is no full Jihadi lone wolf when he makes phone calls to other Jihadists. I published dozens of pieces and was interviewed several times over the past few years trying to explain that in the making of a Jihadist, there must be other Jihadists. The Bush bureaucracy, not policy makers, dodged this reality and the Obama Administration and bureaucracy pushed back against it. But Ft Hood, Arkansas and Boston reconfirmed it, sadly and deeply. Walid Phares
Three days after the tenth anniversary of September 11, left-wing activist Spencer Ackerman struck a blow for Muslim terrorism by denouncing FBI training materials as Islamophobic.
The training materials dealt with such topics as the doctrinal basis for Jihad and the origins of terrorism in Islamic law. The story spread into the mainstream media, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders had endorsed terrorist groups and helped raise money for terrorists, began pressuring the FBI to recant the threat of Islamic terrorism.
In February of 2012, Amine El Khalifi was arrested for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing in the US Capitol building. Before he began his mission, he visited the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, whose former Imam was Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki and whose parishioners included Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan. At his sentencing, El Khalifi said, “I just want to say that I love Allah.”
But that did not stop the FBI from announcing a few days later that it had completed purging references to Islamic terrorism from its training materials. A month earlier, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had begun his trip to Russia and by the time he returned, the training materials meant to prepare agents for the reality of the terrorist plot that he and his brother would carry out had been buried out of sight.
Where El Khalifi had failed in Washington, the Tsarnaev brothers would succeed in Boston.
The counterterrorism information purge had been completed by the time the lead Boston bomber returned to America, but it had begun earlier under Obama.
The 9/11 Commission Report had freely used terms like “Jihad,” “Takfir” and “Islam” to define the nature and motivations of the enemy. But the 2009 National Intelligence Strategy did not mention them. Neither did the FBI counterterrorism lexicon. They had been replaced by “violent extremism.”
Violent extremism is generic. Predicting an attack requires specifics. Investigators cannot stop undefined crimes or arrest undefined suspects. The less information they have to work with, the more likely the terrorists are to succeed.
Islam is the crucial link between disparate terrorist groups from Dagestan to Thailand, from Mali to Afghanistan, from Israel to Nigeria and from the United States to Chechnya. Without the Islam factor, there was no reason to suspect that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a threat to anyone except the Russians.
The old FBI training materials had explained what Chechen, Pakistani, Egyptian and Nigerian terrorists had in common. In the new ones there was a great empty space in which facts died and lives were lost.
The FBI’s list of “Ten Most Wanted” fugitives dates back to 1950 but the list of “Most Wanted Terrorists” dates back to just after 9/11 and a sense that terrorism had become a strategic threat. Today, the list includes 31 individuals, all of them male and with a single exception (Daniel Andreas San Diego, an animal rights extremist), all of them Muslim:
Abd al Aziz Awda – 1950, Palestinian, Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed Al-Nasser – ca. 1947, Saudi, Saudi Hizbullah
Abdul Rahman Yasin – 1960, American, World Trade Center bombing in 1993
Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah – 1963, Egyptian, Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings in 1998
Adam Yahiye Gadahn – 1978, American, Al-Qaeda
Adnan G. El Shukrijumah – 1975, Guyanese, Al-Qaeda
Ahmad Ibrahim Al-Mughassil – 1967, Saudi, Saudi Hizbullah
Ali Atwa – ca. 1960, Lebanese, TWA hijacking in 1985
Ali Saed Bin Ali El-Hoorie – 1965, Saudi, Saudi Hizbullah
Anas Al-Liby – 1964, Libyan, Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings in 1998
Hakimullah Mehsud – ca. 1980, Pakistani, Pakistani Taliban
Hasan Izz-Al-Din – 1963, Lebanese, TWA hijacking in 1985
Husayn Muhammad Al-Umari – 1936, Lebanese, 15 May Organization
Ibrahim Salih Mohammed Al-Yacoub – 1966, Saudi, Saudi Hizbullah
Isnilon Totoni Hapilon – 1966, Filipino, Abu Sayyaf Group
Jaber A. Elbaneh – 1966, Yemeni, Al-Qaeda
Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim – 1965, Palestinian, Pan Am hijacking in 1986
Jamel Ahmed Mohammed Ali Al-Badawi – 1960, Yemeni, USS Cole bombing in 2000
Jehad Serwan Mostafa – 1981, American, Al-Shabaab
Mohammed Ali Hamadei – 1964, Lebanese, Lebanese Hizbullah
Muhammad Abdullah Khalil Hussain Ar-Rahayyal – 1965, Palestinian, Pan Am hijacking in 1986
Muhammad Ahmed Al-Munawar – 1965, Palestinian, Abu Nidal Organization
Omar Shafik Hammami – 1984, American, Al-Shabaab
Raddulan Sahiron – ca. 1936, Filipino, Abu Sayyaf Group
Ramadan Abdullah Mohammad Shallah – 1958, Palestinian, Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Saif Al-Adel – ca. 1960, Egyptian, Al-Qaeda
Wadoud Muhammad Hafiz Al-Turki – 1955, Palestinian, Pan Am hijacking in 1986
Zulkifli Abdhir – 1966, Malaysian, Kumpulun Mujahidin Malaysia
Comments:
(1) Muslims make up 30 out of 31 most wanted terrorists, or about 97 percent of them. That’s a pretty good indication of what Bernard Lewis’ 1990 article famously called “Muslim rage” and why Islam-related issues have such prominence.
(2). Islamists make up 27 out of those 30; only the three perpetrators of the Pan Am 73 hijacking in 1986 (Rahayyal, Munawar, Turki), all connected to the Abu Nidal Organization, are not Islamists (or at least were not in 1986). This predominance of jihad reflects the Islamist hegemony among politically extreme Muslims.
(3) Ethnic Arabs make up 25 of the 30 terrorists. The largest numbers are 4 each of Lebanese, Palestinians, and Saudis, 3 each of Americans and Egyptians. Non-ethnic Arabs include 2 Filipinos, 1 Malaysian, 1 Pakistani, and 1 American convert. This high percentage confirms the sense that Arabic-speakers have the most pent-up hostility toward Americans.
(4) Most attacks by these most wanted fugitives date from the 1980s and 1990s – Khobar, TWA 847, East African embassies, WTC bombing. Symbolically of this relative antiquity, the only American airlines attacked by them were Pan American and TWA, both long defunct. This points to the greater success since 9/11 in both foiling and tracking terrorism, thanks to greater resources and more diligence.
(5) Also reflecting the long-ago quality of this most wanted list, note the striking pattern of their decadal birthdates:
The average age is close to 50 – not exactly the prime time of life for terrorism. The youngest listee, Hammami, will be 29 years old in less than a week. The eldest two, Umari and Sahiron, are approaching 80. (April 30, 2013)
While new facts about the Boston Marathon bombing may yet emerge, what we already know is enough to qualify it definitively as a terrorist act perpetrated by people motivated by a radical interpretation of Islam. To most people, this is sufficient proof that American soil has yet again become the target of Islamist terrorism. While this fact has certainly disappointed assorted cognoscenti in the mainstream media who fervently hoped that the perpetrators would turn out to be right-wing extremists, it is no longer easy to contest it.
Instead, a new narrative has taken hold among the bien-pensants and their army of terror “experts”: the myth of the self-radicalized lone-wolf terrorist. The members of this species, we’re told by USA Today, do not appear to be “engaged terrorists,” nor are they “part of a widespread organized terror plot.” Rather, they “fit the pattern seen in Europe of disaffected young men” who self-radicalized on the Internet. However, fear not: It is still possible that “the brothers were right-wing terrorists,” according to unnamed experts, and a learned scholar from the University of Leicester tells us they may have “had some connection with a neo-Nazi group.”
The message this epic nonsense conveys is that these disaffected young men do not present much of a threat since they’re not involved with al-Qaeda and, therefore, with “engaged terrorism,” whatever that means. Even if true, this would be cold comfort to the victims of the Boston massacre. But not only is it patently false, it represents an insidious and craven apologetic for the mayhem radical Islam has wreaked and will continue to wreak in America.
So let us briefly look at the mythical self-radicalized lone-wolf terrorist. There have been 19 documented foiled terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11. The vast majority of the suspects were born and raised in America and radicalized here long before some of them sought training and assistance from foreign jihadists. Nor were they radicalized on the Internet. In virtually every case, they embraced Islamism in American mosques and Islamic centers under the control of radical Wahhabi, salafi, or Muslim Brotherhood imams, some of whom turned out to be wannabe jihadists themselves. This unfortunate reality is neither a coincidence nor an aberration
.
During nearly 20 years as a senior analyst with the national security division of the Rand Corporation, Alexiev directed numerous research projects for the Department of Defense and other agencies. He is the author of several books and myriad monographs and articles on national security issues. His present research focuses on issues related to Islamic extremism and terrorism. Alex Alexiev is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.
Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Means and opportunity tell us how the crime could have been committed while motive tells us why it was committed. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to common beliefs.
Eliminate motive from terrorism and it becomes no different than investigating a random killing. If investigators are not allowed to profile potential terrorists based on shared beliefs rooted in violence, that makes it harder to catch terrorists after an act of terror and incredibly difficult before the act of terror takes place.
The roadblock isn’t only technical; it’s conceptual. Investigations consist of connecting the dots. If you can’t conceive of a connection, then the investigation is stuck. If you can’t make the leap from A to B or add two to two and get four, then you are dependent on lucky breaks. And lucky breaks go both ways. Sometimes investigators get lucky and other times the terrorists get lucky.
Federal law enforcement was repeatedly warned by the Russians that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dangerous, but operating under the influence of a political culture that refused to see Islam as a motive for terrorism, it failed to connect the dots between Chechen violence in Russia and potential terrorism in the United States, and because it could not see Islam as a motive, as a causal factor rather than a casual factor, it could find no reason why Tamerlan was a threat not just to Russia, but also to the United States.
The missing motive factor has led to a rash of lone wolf terrorists whose acts are classified as individual crimes. Nidal Hasan’s killing spree at Fort Hood was put down to workplace violence, but workplace violence isn’t a motive, it’s a bland description. The motive was obvious in Hasan’s background and his behavior; but the military, an organization that by its nature has to be able to predict the actions of the enemy, had been crippled and left unable to see Islam as a motive.
