Boston Attack: Young Terrorists Are Victims of Universal Hypocrisy

“They did not live in Chechnya but in America and that was where they were educated,”* Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic, arrogantly confirmed when he learned that the Boston terrorists — the Tsarnaev brothers — are of Chechen descent. Kadyrov is perhaps better known as Putin’s ruthless puppet against the guerrilla fighters struggling to obtain true independence from Moscow.

Why apologize if you claim you are not guilty? This sounds like an attempt to shrug off the unspeakable violence committed by his father’s troops and Russian soldiers — sent first by Yeltsin and then by Putin — against the majority of the Chechen population. Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya courageously reported on the violence committed against women, the elderly and children. If the secessionist guerrilla fighters, whose ranks have recently swelled to include Muslim fundamentalists (the majority of Chechens have historically practiced a moderate form of Islam), do not accept their fake status as an autonomous Russian republic, it is not only the fault of the ex-director of the KGB (a good friend of Berlusconi), but that of a global community that has once again closed its eyes to a never-ending tragedy. Notwithstanding their youth, the Tsarnaev bothers arrived in the United States bearing a long and traumatic family history.

The term “family” should be used loosely and include not only members of their nuclear family, but also those of their clan. The great Chechen diaspora began in the 1940s when Stalin ordered the deportation of the Chechen population. The Chechens and Ingush were sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan, the latter once a member of the Soviet Union and at present ruled essentially as a dictatorship by President Nazarbayev and his relatives, who enjoy a large revenue stream from oil, the proceeds from which they do not share with the country’s 17 million Kazakhstanis. Kazakhstan is a place the Tsarnaev brothers passed through many years later. From an early age, the two refugees — converts to terrorism — were subjected to the unhealthy living conditions created by Russia’s international conventions and the global community’s hypocrisy. And with their parents and brothers they wandered, searching for a place that would grant them asylum.

Years ago the two ended up in Dagestan, where their father currently lives, on their way to Kyrgyzstan. Dzhokhar, the survivor of the massive Boston manhunt, was born in this small state that was once part of the Soviet Union. Tamerlan, a former boxer who today lies dead in a freezer, had commented on a photo of another boxer on Facebook. “If Chechnya doesn’t become independent,” he wrote, “I would like to compete for the United States and not for Russia.”**

They did not hate America, but neither did they understand it, in the same way that they probably did not understand the hypocritical and cowardly world they were a part of. For this reason they found themselves drawn to Islam, a faith they knew by tradition. Like every monotheistic religion, it professed another world beyond this one. But they were naïve and didn’t realize that their radical imam, a supporter of jihad who later became Tamerlan’s spiritual counselor, was like many other Islamic fundamentalist predators: an exploiter. He was yet another hypocrite who used the pretext of religion to exploit the young, disoriented and traumatized. The death and the pain the brothers have sown in the country where they lived and were given the opportunity to study should not be excused, but neither should it surprise us. We live in a world that thrives on a culture of violence and enriches itself through the sale of arms, all the while covering itself with the fig leaf of the United Nations’ pro-human rights resolutions that it then promptly and hypocritically disregards. I am writing this while in Israel, another nation that has violated more than one legitimate demand by the Palestinians for their own state.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation is accurately translated from the Italian. However, the Russian transcript of Kadyrov’s statement is a bit different: “They grew up in the USA, their viewpoints and beliefs were formed there.”

**Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.