Coping With Reality

There is excitement and determination and the infrastructure and the volunteers have all been put in place for Monday's Boston Marathon. Last year's dreadful attack on participants in the Marathon will always be recalled and the horrors that people lived through that will never fade from memory will always concern some, but never persuade most that they should absent themselves from this tradition celebrating spring and athletic exuberance.

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The two crude improved explosive devices devised from pressure cookers killed three innocent bystanders to the event and injured 264 more people in a maelstrom of sound and the fury of flying objects. The world is a wonderful place, but there are savage incidents that happen, when least expected. Who might have imagined that two young brothers, immigrants given citizenship would choose of their own volition to destroy lives as revenge for imagined religious insults?

The Inspectors General of the United States intelligence system recently released a report on their findings, concluding that what had occurred was not a result of gross intelligence failure. Information had been shared among federal intelligence agencies The American counter-terrorism watch had briefly been interested in the elder of the Tsarnaev brothers, but nothing merited further investment in his activities.

The FSB, the Russian security service updated from the original KGB, contacted the FBI relating to their uncovering of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's perceived interest in jihad, two years before the bombing they planned and executed with such damning success. The gist of the Russian intelligence was to alert American authorities that Tamerlan and his mother Zubeidat were seen as "adherents of radical Islam".

The FSB had information that Tamerlan would be embarking on a visit to Russia to join "bandit underground groups" in Dagestan and Chechnya. The FBI's succeeding investigation found no incriminating evidence of a potential threat to national security and his file was closed in June 2011. The Russian security service never did respond to a request for further information.

As matters transpired Tamerlan did travel to Russia where he remained for six months. No evidence exists that he joined any jihadist group while there. In fact no trace has ever been found in the succeeding investigation, post-bombing that either of the brothers were members of any jihadi faction, that they received training anywhere. Instead, a general agreement ensued that they had chosen to radicalize themselves.

They absorbed the fanatical Islamist ravings they found on the Internet, and their amateur bomb-making came from the (another 'radicalized' American citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki-produced al-Qaeda-affiliated online magazine Inspire. They were inspired to become soldiers of Islam, mujahadeen, through a sense of grievance and a call to respond to the jihadist code of defending Islam from the infidels, the unbelievers, the kuffar, Crusaders and Jews.

The solution to the growing incidence of 'self-radicalized', home-grown jihadis points in the direction of community liaison, as far as the intelligence community concludes. These are called 'vulnerable' communities from within which come these specimens of psychopathic haters of the West whom they blame for Islamophobia and assaults on the verities and values of Islam. In responding as they do, they respond to the universal call to the faithful to avenge perceived assaults on Islam.

Since it is from within the Muslim communities that these jihadis arise, whether through the infiltrated indoctrination they are exposed to by fanatical clerics from abroad or at home, or community leaders or their very own family members, it seems more logical to consider the non-Muslim communities surrounding the Muslim ones that choose to separate themselves from the mainstream, as the 'vulnerable' communities. The choice of descriptive a telling enough indication of 'non-judgement'.

So the intelligence community convinces itself and instructs itself to interact delicately and with full sympathy with the 'vulnerable' -- not 'compromised' -- community of Muslims harbouring within their walls of segregated piety, threats to the larger community whose country and whose nation has accepted their presence, with tolerance and non-judgemental understanding that all men are created equal and some religions simply more equal than others.

This represents a delicate balance; to sympathize with and plumb the depths of psychic 'understanding' of a religion whose basic tenets demand jihad as one of a few alternatives to proselytize, to challenge non-believers to become believers, surrendering to Islam, or pay the consequences which through a long tradition has always meant death. Since this is a core belief of pure Islam and that belief permeates the community dedicated to the Sharia underlying Islam, what then?

The very fact of "them and us" focuses on the fundamental values underlying Islam; the one true religion, all others being false and the need to turn non-believers toward Islam, mitigates against cooperation of any value in uncovering and revealing the presence within the Muslim community of those prepared to dedicate themselves to martyrdom; their own and that of those they target as sacrifices to Islam.