The Conspiracies, The Realities

The twin explosions that destroyed the celebratory peace and competition of the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing three innocent spectators and maiming and wounding another 170 people, was the first significant terrorist attack that targeted civilians in the United States since September 11, 2001. There were other atrocities committed by Islamic terrorists, most notably the Fort Hood mass shooting in 2009 by U.S. Army major Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 soldiers and injured 30.

Many other planned, not-yet-executed terrorist attacks have been apprehended before they could occur, with the terrorists taken into custody, tried and incarcerated. With a population of 310-million, the challenge to remain vigilant to the scrutiny, identification and investigation of all possible extremists seeking to do damage to the country represents a formidable task.

The kind of viral hatred that doesn't blink at the prospect of slaughtering people is impossible to even contemplate let alone isolate.

But that is the hatred that motivates people who nurse grievances against the most powerful country in the world, seeking to do harm to its people, eager to destroy its infrastructure, even if just as a symbol of how, in the face of determined terrorism, it remains vulnerable to attack. Particularly so in the instance of those whom it trusts to respect its values and system of justice and equality from within.

All the more so when the United States is known as a melting pot of diverse ethnic groups, religions, ideologies and cultures. The famed Statue of Liberty is the first welcoming Beacon that was traditionally seen by emigrants from abroad travelling by sea: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, to me."

Opportunities abound, respect for others' culture and religion, law-abiding equality the measure of the culture. Immigrants found, and continue to find, their new lives of aspirational opportunities there, with no distinction made between origin and minority status, a country of law and order and fundamental human decency. Yet, taking advantage of all that is on offer, there remain those who reject it and turn instead to what a careful political executive terms "extremism".

The extremism of the right-wing, the conspiracists, the borderline sane - and the dreaded Islamists for whom terrorizing others is an assured staple of Islamic values; jihad. When the U.S. experienced its first dreadful attack on 9/11 there were many in North America who smugly insisted it was their chickens coming home to roost; that interference in other countries' affairs brought the tragedy of revenge to American shores.

Academics, unionists, left-wing conspiracists spoke knowingly of 'root causes'. They made common cause with Islamists in the Middle East who saw those attacks as reason to celebrate that the arrogance of the United States that dictates its vision of human rights and democracy to those to which these are alien concepts, was adequately repaid, in a down payment of what was to come in the future.

With the Boston Marathon attack and its success in murder and destruction the future has finally arrived for the furtive, hate-filled and death-obsessed Islamists. In Canada, from former PM Jean Chretien's slimy linking of the 9/11 attacks to Western arrogance, to then-NDP leader Alexa McDonough waxing on about children dying of hunger and preventable disease, and why Palestinian children danced in the streets at news of the attack, the message was clear enough.

What they claimed and spoke of as 'root causes' implicitly argued that American policies led to terror attacks, servicing the Islamic myths of pay-back for the arrogance of the U.S. in exploiting the natural resources of Muslim countries and occupying their land with military troops purporting to seek peace but fomenting destabilization and violence instead. As though any kind of Western intervention could stifle the murderous relations between Islam's tribal and sectarian hostilities.

The United States under the current administration speaks more carefully, acts with greater prudence, verging on timidity now, respecting Middle East and Muslim affairs. As though the administration gives credence to the Islamist claims of Islamophobia and racial profiling being the problem, not the attempted solution to an Islamic problem of death-delivering fascism.

With this latest attack, courtesy of a home-grown jihadist family cell with perhaps larger links that are yet to be revealed, there still exists those who enjoy living in their fantasy world of the poor and the dispossessed, the exploited and the miserable raising their voices and their fists in vengeance for the tribulations visited upon them by the West and specifically the United States.

When in fact, the poor and the exploited live in their existential misery because they are ruled by tyrants and dictators and their state of existence has nothing to do with the West. It has everything to do with the discordant dysfunction of most Muslim countries and their vicious rulers. And then, when the solution seems at hand, when protests are sufficiently animated to bring about change, what comes to the fore is Islamism as secular tyrants melt into history.

That pure strain of historical Islam exemplified by Salafists and Wahhabists, the Muslim Brotherhood and their state and non-state militias like Hezbollah and Hamas is what propels the Islamism of violent jihad that runs through Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and wherever one now looks in dismay at the Muslim world. And all of them have selected the United States as their number one enemy, plotting and dreaming of doing it harm.

And some of them succeed. This time it was men who chose to do just that, in spurning the good that came to them through their privileges of life in the United States.