The Power of Terror

Those who wish to impose hardship, misery and fear on others have no need to resort to the very darkest of human traits and capabilities: murder, to inflict terror on others. That their twisted hatred leads them to destroy and to slaughter, and to take satisfaction in wreaking dismay, havoc and fear simply demonstrates how ferocious their fall from the grace of humanity has been. 

Their murderous psychopathy animates them with a need to destroy. To leave indelible impressions that their enemies are destined to suffer at their hands. Atrocities need not necessarily be frequent occurrences, though it is clear enough that the Islamist jihadist cells compelled by the ideology of jihad intend to inflict anguish and murder wherever they can, whenever they can. 

The very fact that they continually attempt to succeed, is their success. Even failed attempts succeed for their implicit threat.

The war that currently exists between the fiercest exemplars of violent Islamism and their targets -- both the West and all its symbols, and their own fellow Muslims whose faith manifestations fall short of the expectations of the fundamentalists among them -- seeks the victor and the vanquished. Fundamentalism has produced a cadre of rabidly committed jihadists believing that it is required of them to instill terror within their enemies. 

Ter.ror
/'terer/
Noun 1. Extreme fear: "People fled in terror"; "a terror or darkness".
2. The use of such fear to intimidate people, esp. for political reasons: "weapons of terror".
Synonyms: Horror - Dread - Fright - Fear - Panic - Dismay - Scare

All that and more has been accomplished by the lurking fear now firmly ensconced in societies where Islamist fundamentalism of the Wahhabist Saudis and the Salafists have bred a culture of sacred-duty violent jihad in honour of the demands for submission to the will of Allah, to respect and to spread the sacred word among the infidels. The Islamic conquest of the unbelievers has never abated and has now simply accelerated.

Two young men conscripted into the religious ethos of violent jihad believe they are instructed by god to wreak havoc, destroy peace and lives, and inflict a state of terror on a country they believe is at war with their religion. They have no compunction in killing innocent people in the pursuit of their obligation to Islam, as they believe it. They feel no regret, no compassion, and after the carnage has subsided, simply proceed with their lives.

Those who have been affected feel afresh the residual state of fear they experienced on an earlier attack on their country. The country has instituted a series of protective reforms to institutions, security procedures, and crime-alert protocols -- costly, time-consuming, complicating national security and the lives of the country's citizens.

Terror wreaks its destructive effects on the culture of a country and the psyches of its people. The weight of the cost and the attention given to instituting security measures, of surveillance, of inspections and the covert pursuit of intelligence to identify and to apprehend groups and individuals intent on wreaking further harm, diverts attention and costs from other vital state matters.

In apprehending the supposed only two perpetrators of the Boston Marathon Bombing, all the mechanisms and personnel and instruments of state and federal investigative and defensive elements within the nation were brought to the fore; intensive, costly and interrupting normal life at every level. A city of over six million people sent into a desperate flurry of fear and security.

All normal activities suspended, the city in lock-down, in a desperate effort to secure  the environment, to ensure that the vicious malefactors are unable to repeat the atrocity earlier inflicted. Two lone men desperate to evade detection and arrest, anxious to continue their self-appointed task of avenging Islam against the country that seeks to destroy it, with all the force amassed against it that a wealthy state can muster.

Two men and their intent balanced against four lives taken, many more lives forever altered through the pain and suffering of surrendering normal bodily conformation to mutilated parts, and countless others traumatized by fear and intimidation, the physical effects of direct contact with the immense concussion from the blast, and a city left with a dread legacy of remembrance.

Terrorism works to deflate the enemy's self-confidence, resulting in a state of never-arrested concern that just around the corner, where it is least expected, the ordinariness of a day will be forever deranged by the results of a hateful ideology identifying enemies that must be destroyed and those who survive live forever in doubt about the future.