Jihad in Boston?

By Robert Spencer

 

The Boston terror bombings may be jihad. It is also possible that they may not be. As of this writing on Monday evening, those who know – the perpetrators and their accomplices, and possibly law enforcement officials — aren’t saying anything. Whatever the truth may be, the reactions to the initial reports from various quarters were telling.

An early report from the New York Post stated that “investigators have a suspect — a Saudi Arabian national — in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings.” However, Boston police denied that they had a suspect in custody, and Leftists and Islamic supremacists rushed to spread that news: Talking Points Memo ran a fairly straightforward piece, but at Salon, Alex Seitz-Wald headlined his report “Pamela Geller blames a ‘Jihadi,’” excoriating Geller for “seizing on a thinly sourced New York Post report.” Islamic supremacist writer Reza Aslan tweeted: “Boston Police: No Arrests Have Been Made In Marathon Bombing so Enough with the Saudi National BS.”

The implication was that if there was no Saudi national in custody, then the bombings were not jihad. The egg was on their faces, however, when it turned out that the New York Post had been right, and that authorities really did have a Saudi national in custody. According to CBS News, “Law enforcement sources told Miller a witness saw a person acting suspiciously when the explosions happened along the marathon route.” Miller explained:

They see him running away from the device. Now, a reasonable person would be running away. But this person had noticed him before. This is a civilian — chases him down, tackles him, turns him over to the Boston police. The individual is being looked at [and] was suffering from burn injury. That means this person was pretty close to wherever this blast went off, but not so close as to suffer the serious injuries that other people did.

There are other indications that this was a jihad attack: the timed and coordinated bombings were of a kind we have seen previously in the Mumbai jihad attacks, as well as in numerous jihad bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also like Mumbai, the bombs seem to have been set off remotely by cell phone. Yet characteristically, some in the mainstream media rushed to blame “right-wingers”: according to Victor Medina in the Examiner, “Esquire Magazine’s Charles P. Pierce attempted to link the bombings to right wing extremists similar to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In another, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen speculated that the type of bomb device could link it to right wing extremist groups.”

Such reactions were illustrative of the general mainstream media avidity to downplay and even deny outright that there really is a jihad threat at all. Ultimately, however, whether or not this Saudi (who has been identified as being in the U.S. on a student visa) was involved in the attack or not, and whether or not this Boston Marathon bombing was a jihad attack at all, the jihad against the U.S. still rages. ‪Jihadists worldwide have made their hatred for Americans, and determination to murder them in the name of Allah, abundantly clear on numerous occasions. If the Boston terror bombings turn out to have been perpetrated by someone else, this doesn’t mean that violent jihadists have disappeared. Jihad is already here in the United States, as we saw not only on 9/11, but in the Fort Hood jihad murders, the attempted Times Square bombing, the Portland Christmas tree bomb plot, and so many others. There have been over 20,000 jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11; the denial that dominates the media and government response to those attacks only ensures that such jihad attacks will become ever more common stateside.

And so as the new coverage continued on Monday night, commentators speculated about whether the terror attack was “domestic” or “foreign.” While leftist analysts freely speculated about “right-wing” involvement, those who declared the attack jihad on the basis of the questioning of the Saudi national were excoriated as “Islamophobes.”  The media marches in lockstep, aided and abetted by a Greek chorus of activists and fellow travelers on Twitter and other social media. And the direction in which they are marching is rendering us all more unsafe.