By Peter Foster World Last updated: April 23rd, 2013
Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.
If you want to understand why the American Right is fuming about the Left’s attitudes to the Boston bombings, look no further than this stunningly one-eyed article by Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian’s "security and liberty" correspondent.
“Why is Boston 'terrorism' but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine?” he asks rhetorically, before asserting that “there is no known evidence, at least not publicly available, about their [the bombers’] alleged motives”.
“Even those assuming the guilt of the Tsarnaev brothers," he adds, "seem to have no basis at all for claiming that this was an act of 'terrorism' in a way that would meaningfully distinguish it from Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine.”
No basis? I’m not for trial by media, or for wild speculation – you’ll note that the Telegraph has not jumped to conclusions this last week when other media outlets have – but it simply flies in the face of the known facts to suggest that the Boston bombings are indistinguishable from those mass shootings.
So let me try and “meaningfully distinguish” the Boston bombers from the shooters at Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine.
The Boston bombers were unlike the shooters listed above because:
1) They used pipe and pressure-cooker bombs, a type of IED that has been well-documented as being used by al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and elsewhere. They did not just use guns, that are all too widely available in the US.
2) The elder of the two bombers, Tamerlan, apparently had a YouTube account with videos celebrating jihad and the millenarian prophesy of the Black Banners – a well-known al-Qaeda meme.
3) According to the FBI’s own statement, a foreign government – presumed to be Russia – raised concerns that Tamerlan was “a follower of radical Islam”, and two US officials have also said that the brothers were religiously motivated.
4) The same warning added that Tamerlan had “changed drastically” since 2010, something corroborated by both friends and family members who say that Tamerlan suddenly started praying "five times a day".
5) Tamerlan, a strict Muslim who did not drink or smoke, rails against the decadence of America – a classic complaint of those who espouse the path of jihad. “There are no values anymore”, worried Tamerlan when interviewed for a photo essay, “people can't control themselves”.
6) And then Tamerlan visited Dagestan for six months, a place where Islamist terrorists are known to proliferate and train, and according to the local police, also seems to have made contact with known militants who were under surveillance.
So while the picture remains incomplete, all the signs are that the Boston bombings were motivated by militant Islam. To say otherwise strikes me as both silly and dangerous.
To point out these facts is not to say all Muslims are militants, or that all Muslims should be kept under surveillance, or to stir up anti-Muslim sentiments – which, as anyone who dips into the US Twitter sphere will know – are alive and well on the Christian Right in America.
It is also not to deny that fears of an anti-Muslim backlash are real, based on what happened after 9/11 and Barack Obama is absolutely right to warn against stereotyping or encouraging, even inadvertently, attacks on the Muslim community.
He is also right I believe – practically, legally and morally – that the surviving bomber, a US citizen, must be tried in a US federal court for his alleged crimes, which do not deserve to be glorified as a "military action".
But wilful blindness to the known facts, is not the answer. Indeed as Michael Mukasey, the former US attorney general, argues in today’s Wall Street Journal, it actually stokes the very same rage and intolerance on the Right that it is aimed at suppressing.
Only by identifying and confronting the “totalitarian ideology” of militant Islam for what it is, can we then differentiate and champion the mainstream Muslim faithful who abhor the violent jihadists who – globally speaking – kill far more Muslims than they do “infidel Americans”.
Over the last five years Mr Obama has been so much at pains to differentiate himself from the Manichean pronouncements of the Bush administration and its "Axis of Evil", that he appears to have lost track of reality.
By not confronting – and separating out – the threat posed by militant Islam, Mr Obama is fanning the flames of conspiracy nuts and anti-Muslim sentiment.
Now is not the time for Mr Obama to duck the issue, but on the contrary to stop treading on egg-shells, and to take the opportunity to deploy his considerable rhetorical skills, and the bully pulpit his office affords him, and start taking the lead on an issue that is not going away, no matter how hard he wishes it would.
