Longing for White Killers

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On April 15, 2013, a brilliantly sunny Monday afternoon, the Boston Marathon was drawing to a close, and a large crowd had gathered to greet friends and family members among the runners. Then two nail bombs exploded in quick succession, killing two people and wounding well over two hundred, maiming some for life. Before the identity of the bombers became known, the mainstream media was full of hope that those Bible-quoting Christian killers they had warned about so frequently would finally materialize.

Media reports were full of speculation about how the bombings appeared to be the work of “right-wing extremists,” “Tea Partiers,” and the like. On the day of the bombings, Charles P. Pierce in Esquire was one of the first of many to caution people against thinking that the Marathon had just been the site of a jihad attack (“foreign terrorism”) and to try to link the bombings to the Right: “Obviously, nobody knows anything yet, but I would caution folks jumping to conclusions about foreign terrorism to remember that this is the official Patriots Day holiday in Massachusetts, celebrating the Battles at Lexington and Concord, and that the actual date (April 19) was of some significance to, among other people, Tim McVeigh, because he fancied himself a waterer of the tree of liberty and the like.”

Likewise, CNN’s national security analyst, Peter Bergen, speculated that if “conventional explosives” had been used, “that might be some other kind of right-wing extremists,” as opposed to Al Qaeda. He reminded viewers that “we’ve also seen other extremist groups attacking, right-wing groups, for instance trying to attack the Martin Luther King parade in Oregon in 2010.”

Most egregiously of all, David Sirota of Salon hoped that the bomber would turn out to be a “white American.”

Sirota got his wish, but not in exactly the way he had hoped. The killers, two brothers named Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were indeed white – indeed, veritable Caucasians – and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a naturalized American citizen.

The Tsarnaev brothers were two Muslims from southern Russia near the breakaway Muslim republic of Chechnya. Their motivations quickly became clear. CNN reported a week after the bombings that “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, has said his brother — who was killed early Friday — wanted to defend Islam from attack.”

Also, just before he was captured, when he was hiding out inside a pleasure boat, Dzhokhar wrote a long self-justification on the inside of the boat, including the line: “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims.”

It came to light relatively quickly after the bombings that on a Russian-language social media page, Dzhokhar had featured a drawing of a bomb under the heading “send a gift,” and just above links to sites about Islam. Tamerlan’s YouTube page contained two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Feiz Mohammed “urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.”

Tamerlan also said, “I’m very religious.” His friend Donald Larking affirmed this: “Tamerlan Tsarnaev was my friend and we talked about everything from politics to religion. He was very, very religious. He believed that the Qur’an was the one true word and he loved it.” Tamerlan noted that he did not drink alcohol because Allah forbade it: “God said no alcohol,” and that his Italian girlfriend had converted to Islam, as his American wife did later. Even his name indicated the world from which he had come: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was apparently named for the warrior Tamerlane, the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Asia, who was a noted for his Muslim piety as he was for his bloodlust: in 1398, he massacred 100,000 Hindus in Delhi, and killed 90,000 more people in Baghdad in 1401, all the while his devout adherence to the religion of Muhammad. This was the figure for whom Tamerlan Tsarnaev was named.

Combine all that with the fact that the Boston Marathon bombs were similar to IED’s that jihadis used in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square in the summer of 2010, used a similar bomb, and that instructions for making such a bomb had been published in al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, and the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers were abundantly clear.

They were two more Islamic jihadis. The media’s hopes that they would turn out to be right-wing racist Christian “extremists” were dashed.