Ten years ago, on April 15, 2013, a brilliantly sunny Monday afternoon, the Boston Marathon was drawing to a close when two nail bombs exploded in quick succession. They killed two people and wounded well over two hundred, maiming some for life. Before the identity of the bombers became known, the establishment media was full of joyful hope that the killers would turn out to be the Bible-quoting Christian terrorists of media myth. Instead, they were Islamic jihadis. As the tenth anniversary of their attack approaches, the same denial still prevails: no one in America wants to discuss why they did it.
Various media retrospectives don’t even attempt to discuss the bombers’ motive. The Washington Post came closest on Thursday when it did the common perpetrator-to-victim shift, claiming that bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev “may have felt victimized because he was Muslim.” Also on Thursday, NBC Boston told a heartwarming love story of a firefighter and a woman he aided that day, but remained mum about why the bombing happened. On Friday, MassLive published a lengthy piece about the lessons that have been learned from the bombing, but apparently, none of those lessons have anything to do with why the bombing happened in the first place. ABC News focused on the psychological scars of some of the survivors but said nary a word about what might have led anyone to want to inflict such scars.
This willful ignorance began on the very day of the bombings. On that day, Charles P. Pierce in Esquire was one of the first of many to caution against thinking that the marathon had just been the site of a jihad attack (“foreign terrorism”) and to try to link the bombings to patriots: “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.” Yeah, that’s it.
Also at that time, 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 hoped in Salon that the bomber would turn out to be a “white American.” Sirota got his wish. The killers were indeed white — actual Caucasians. They were two brothers from the Caucasus, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzhokhar, who was a naturalized American citizen.
Their motivations became clear soon after the attack. 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.” And 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 soon 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 Tsarnaev’s YouTube page, meanwhile, 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, this sheikh “urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.”
Related: The BBC Makes an Islamic Terrorist Into a Hero and (of Course) a Victim
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,” according to Larking. “He was very, very religious. He believed that the Qur’an was the one true word and he loved it.” Tamerlan did not drink alcohol because Allah forbade it — “God said no alcohol” — and his Italian girlfriend had converted to Islam, as his American wife did later.
“I ask Allah to have mercy on me, my brother, and my family,” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said in 2015. He gave every indication of being a pious believer, as was his brother, and of this piety being the foundational motivation for the Boston Marathon bombings. So why is there such a universal refusal to discuss the bombers’ motives? Because Islamic advocacy groups in the U.S., notably the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have successfully convinced the Leftist political and media establishment that informing the public honestly about jihad activity would fuel a dangerous “Islamophobia.”
There is no reason why this should be so any more than it is in any other context. Does the Biden regime refrain from speaking about their phantom bogeyman, “white supremacist terror,” because innocent white people might be victimized? Of course not. And the same forthrightness should hold for actual threats just as much as for imaginary ones. Otherwise, no lessons will indeed have been learned from the Boston Marathon bombing.
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