On April 15, jihadi terrorism returned to the U.S. for the first time since 9/11. Once again, radical Muslims attacked and murdered innocent civilians on American soil.
As more details emerge about the backgrounds and precise motives of the terrorists, brothers Tamerlan and Dzohkhar Tsarnaev, Americans are once more confronted with the fact that certain people hate us with such an intense passion that they are willing to attack civilians – not even government institutions, like Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City – without a second thought.
It seems that the Brothers Tsarnaev were immigrants to the U.S., and seemed to have integrated relatively well to American society. So what motivated them to do such awful things? And what can we do to stop the next attack?
The older brother, Tamerlan, was apparently heavily influenced by a radical Muslim that he met at his mosque. He in turn, it seems, influenced his younger brother, who deeply respected and looked up to him. The cause of all of this terror is a deadly strain of extremist thought masquerading as traditional Islam. In the words of George Bush after 9/11, “The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.â€
These “Muslims†are popping up all over the world, from Saudi Arabia, to Gaza and the West Bank, to Chechnya, to North Africa, and to their strongholds in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are a threat only to their faith and to those who let themselves be intimidated into submission.
Their means is terrorism, but more importantly their end is the elimination of democracy and freedom from the Earth. Their short term goal is to scare, to intimidate, to terrorize. They know that they cannot defeat us militarily; their only hope is to force us to shrink away through intimidation. We cannot let them succeed.
Soon after the bombs went off in Boston, some pundits started questioning if we were safe. We are safe as long as we stand up to those who terrorize us. We win when we live our lives normally, without a thought to the extremists across the globe. They win when they remain in our at the front of our mind.
So when we think about how to respond, other than the prosecution of Dzohkhar Tsarnaev and the defense against both domestic and foreign terrorism by our government, we need to understand what their objective is, how they plan to achieve it, and how we can combat it.
Do not worry about who lurks in the shadows of the Middle East or in the crowds at public events. The best law enforcement teams in the world – the FBI and the U.S. military – will catch the next Tsarnaevs. Instead, focus on upholding and protecting what makes our country and our society great.
America, do not let yourself be terrorized.