Daled Amos: The Boston Marathon Bombing: A Call To Action or A Sign of Things To Come?

Sunday, April 21, 2013

The Boston Marathon Bombing: A Call To Action or A Sign of Things To Come?

Barry Rubin asks Who’s Going to Keep More Teenage Muslims from Becoming the Next Boston Marathon Terrorists? Nobody.

At issue is how Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev seemed to suddenly become radical Islamist terrorists.

The cause, Rubin notes, is the prolific amount of revolutionary Islamist propaganda available:

There are literally hundreds of Internet sites, videos, preachers, books, and everything else you can think of that promote revolutionary Islamism. They tell Muslims that they should and must be revolutionaries and terrorists; they cite holy works to do so.

The problem then is the lack of anything to counteract this:

A Radio Free Islam that systematically preaches (the last word is not chosen at random) an anti-extremist approach to Islam.
Virtually no programs at mosques to explain why terrorist, Islamist, and extremist Islamic positions are wrong and bad. Wrong because they don’t accord with what those who say so deem to be a “proper” Islam; bad because they are immoral, ruin the lives of those who embrace such ideology, and hold back the societies where enough such people have such a view.
Remarkably little literature and remarkably few preachers—especially ones who are as well-financed as the radicals—that a young Muslim is going to read on Internet or hear on videos or elsewhere which suggests an alternative path.
Where are the videos? Where are the web sites? Where is the social disapproval among Muslims?

Rubin enumerates 6 problems that interfere with the establishment of programs along the lines of what was done during the Cold War when, despite the better funding and organization of the Soviets and their supporters, the US government and non-governmental organizations took action.

One of those 6 problems hindering action against Islamist extremists is that

the ability to critique precisely what is radical in Islam and what is wrong with Islamism is handicapped by the successful effort to brand any attempts at making such distinctions as “Islamophobia” instead of a sensible fear of revolutionary Islamism. It is equivalent to branding any such attempt to critique Communism as anti-Sovietism or as a mindless antagonism to liberalism or pure reactionary views. Communists tried such techniques but they only worked to a very limited extent.

Read the whole thing.

At issue is whether the Boston Marathon bombing will become a call to action -- or a sign of things to come.