The Boston Paradox

Who is responsible for the Boston Marathon attacks? Can we blame Russia for trying for over 250 years to integrate Muslim nations from the North Caucasus — citizens from Chechnya and Dagestan — first into the Orthodox Tsarist Empire, then into the USSR and now into the Russian state controlled by President Vladimir Putin? Or should we put the blame on Islamic radicalism, both in Russia and the West?

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s attack undoubtedly led to comparisons with Saudi terrorists who attacked the U.S. on 9/11 or with the Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up Times Square in 2010. Others suggested that Tamerlan, a 26-year-old Chechen national, might have witnessed the 1999 war between Russia and Chechnya or Russia’s brutal efforts to impose peace between insurgents in North Caucasus. Shaken by the cruelty of Russian soldiers, he and his teenage brother chose to commit violent acts on American ground, or so they say.

The issue that emerges with this explanation is, of course, the fact that the Tsarnaev brothers came from Kyrgyzstan. They never lived in Chechnya and their only visit to Dagestan occurred around 2000. They are simply part of the Chechen diaspora. Chechen President and former rebel Ramzan Kadyrov immediately said that the brothers had nothing to do with the Chechen Republic.

Nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar was only eight when his family moved to the U.S. to Cambridge, Mass., and according to the testimonies of several people who knew him, he was a well-integrated American immigrant. Recently, he started exploring his religious and ethnic roots and began having problems at his university. However, he was very familiar with the culture of the U.S.

His older brother Tamerlan, a boxer who was almost good enough to be a professional, was married to a Christian American who converted to Islam and who began supervising her husband. Tsarnaev’s aunt from Dagestan, Patimat Suleimanova, explained that her older nephew never used to pray before he reached America, when he was already 16. “He didn’t even know what Islam was,” she stated for CNN. From her point of view, Tamerlan’s radicalization happened in America.

In essence, the stories of the young men are not much different from those of other “lone wolves” brought up in the U.S. It is usually white, disillusioned men who shed blood in the U.S. The difference is that not all white men are collectively blamed for these atrocities. Adam Lanza from Newtown, Conn. and James Holmes from Aurora, Colo. were never seen as part of a suspicious ethnic or religious group. Even when white, non-Muslim men launched explicit terrorist attacks — such as the Oklahoma attacker Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in 1995, or Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber — their acts were considered to be isolated incidents, not terrorist acts.

On the other hand, terrorist suspects are generally dark-skinned people, primarily Muslim, who are considered pawns in larger conspiracies requiring military involvement and who justify the breach of human rights. The initial call of several congressmen to convict Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant proves my previous statement. It made no difference that Tsarnaev was a naturalized American citizen and he therefore couldn’t be judged by a military court, or that he was captured on American ground and not on the battlefield.

To Obama’s honor, Tsarnaev will be judged by a civil court. But no one criticized the Americans’ tendency toward hateful generalizations of other nations and countries. The Chechens were so quickly demonized that the Czech ambassador in America felt the urge to give an official statement to make sure there would be no confusion between Chechnya and his own country.

The case is dangerous even in Russia. Tsarnaev’s attack is a superficial justification of Putin’s nationalist policy in the North Caucasus and also supports the idea that the two wars Russia started against Chechnya’s independence, in 1994-1996 and in 1999, were carried out in the name of national safety. Hence, the Boston attacks might have been a diplomatic present to him.

However, the only certainty in this bloody affair is that alienated young people of any religion or ethnicity could have acted violently. The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wasn’t too fast to reject the materialistic American lifestyle — after the attack, he continued to post on social networks, went to the gym and attended campus parties — seems to have strengthened his older brother’s resentment of Putin’s brutal new control over the North Caucasus.