Asking Why

Because, just because. Because they don't really know why. Because they responded to a demand to be accountable to a pledge made to surrender themselves completely. And they did. In the process surrendering rationality entirely. Yet are able to rationalize that theirs was a greater obligation to an ideology of raging, unreasoning hatred, than to simple humanity. When others have been questioned while in incarceration they respond with defiance that they were obeying a higher order.

A higher order than respect for humanity and life, over death-dealing and defiling the very notion of humanity must be obeyed on the hierarchy of obligation. There is the most recent picture of two dedicated jihadists, young men, brothers, unalike in personality, but completely alike in their resolve to stalk life and leave death in its place. To make a statement. Their god does not love unbelievers.

Their mission, akin to the mission held dear and pursued with passion by others like them, is to persuade onlookers that there is no escape from the hand of destiny that they wield. If they fail and are arrested, if they succeed and are killed or apprehended, there are countless others to take their place. And take their place they will. They are like the teeth of the dragon that, touching soil, spring to life as demons of death.

The defenders are those who have a familial attachment, and those who share a link with violent jihad. For them, the two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, are martyrs to their common cause, the spread of Islam and Sharia law, with all submitting to the will of Allah. Who, as the younger of the two brothers observed, loves those who do good. Presumably, Dzhokhar believed he was doing good in wrenching life from innocent bystanders.

He is his father's 'angel', the young man with a sweet face, an intelligent individual, studying medicine. The profession of medicine is one that has as its honoured and ancient standard, the Hippocratic oath: "to abstain from doing harm", for this is the healing art, a profession whose history is legendary. But the man stated on a Russian Internet site that registered his profile that his 'world view' was Islam.

Not, obviously, the Islam that the bulk of the faithful worship, but another form of Islam, one of abiding rage against the world, where though impressionable young men like the Tsarnaev brothers may believe that Allah loves those who do good, they are still mired in the banality of an evil so fiercely ingrained that they have become proud messengers of death on behalf of the spirit who loves good.

Ask the 19-year-old hospitalized Dzhokhar why? He may spit back the answer that he was proud to do the will of god. So proud that, after witnessing and feeling and hearing the first of the two explosions, knowing what destruction they were capable of, casually, not so much as flinching, dropped his own pack carrying the second explosive device and walked calmly off.

Later in the week appearing at the university he was attending, greeting friends, preparing for his presence at another party. And conniving with his brother to commit yet more terrorist attacks. Until the ubiquity of videos and photographs taken by cellphones resulted in providing investigators with intriguing and obviously incriminating evidence of persons of interest to police and other investigators of a terrorist crime.