The Internet: The Real School of Terror

The homeland behind the indoctrination of the young perpetrators of the Boston Massacre is probably not Chechnya. It is the intense, secluded and infinite space of the web. Their infatuation with fundamentalist Islam took place on the Net.

The greatest school of terror is the web, a blossoming flower in the large greenhouse of democracy.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the surviving brother of the pair of marathon terrorists, arrived as a refugee in Cambridge, near Boston, 10 years ago. This boy, though ethnically Chechnyan and from a Muslim region, lived there for only nine years. That he was a rabid nationalist-Islamist terrorist indoctrinated by the colors and smells of his homeland, oppressed by Russia — it’s really almost impossible to imagine. Perhaps his brother, Tamerlan — who did spend six months there, perhaps for military training, a year ago and ended his life as an assassin at 26 years old just three days ago — had raised the definitive flag of war for the two. Perhaps in Chechnya he decided to become a shahid [witness, martyr]. But the homeland behind the indoctrination of these youths is probably not Chechnya. It is the intense, secluded and infinite space of the web.

Therefore, with good reason, the Mujahedeen of the Caucasus Emirate rejected these boys, denying that the organization had any role in the attack on Boston: “The Caucasian mujahedeen are not fighting against the United States of America,” they said. “We are at war with Russia.”

Essentially, the eradication of young people from conflict zones such as the Caucasus — and certainly these regions are not few, just think of the Middle East and Africa — and their transferral into our democratic and liberal societies, which they consider hostile, creates a space of radicalization that takes place far away from its land of origin on the endless shores of the web — and especially on Islamist websites. There these boys found news related to their ethnic and religion origins, and they found it immediately, often in a random manner: a series of violent harangues, a hymn to death, to martyrdom in the name of their identity. It is these sources of radicalism that led the Tsarnaev brothers to terror.

There are certainly links: A Chechen leader named Khattab probably met bin Laden in the years between ’79 and ’89 during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and in addition, Chechen fighters fought against the United States next to al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. On the Hamas website you can find Chechen martyrs and the like. But this does not constitute evidence of a contemporary link. Most of the Caucasian nationalist sites and blogs disapprove of the attack on Boston: They fear that, because of the attack, the Americans might join the Russians against the Chechens.

The truth is, the answer to Obama’s question — “Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our community and country resort to violence?” — can be found on the pages of the web — the pages, for example, of Tamerlan’s favorite internet preacher, Feiz Mohammad, a Lebanese man who lives in Sydney. It is in the downloaded videos of war; in the lessons on how to make explosives on al-Qaida website “Inspire”; in a thousand anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-women and anti-homosexual diatribes. Many terrorists are true Americans, who have learned their history from their computers through jihadi eyes. A RAND study profiling jihadis showed that 74 percent of the people involved in attacks on the United States were American citizens, of whom 49 percent were born on American soil and 29 percent naturalized citizens. Another scholar, Yuri Teper, explains that, in the case of the Tsarnaevs, their Chechen-Islamist background “made them more susceptible to the virtual Salafi community. These brothers are as American as the terrorist who killed the Jewish family in France was French.”* Not a country or an armed group, only the army of Salafi propaganda on the web.

* Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.