Tag Archive for: Boston Bombing

Rolling Stone becomes latest Leftist publication to glamorize ‘Palestinian’ jihad terrorists

This is not the first time that Rolling Stone has glamorized jihadis.

Rolling Stone Jumps On Pro-Terrorist Bandwagon

by Karen Bekker, CAMERA, August 3, 2023:

Although they’re slightly late to the partyRolling Stone seems to have gotten the memo that the latest trend in antisemitic agitation posing as journalism is glamourizing young Palestinian terrorists. A nearly 6000-word piece by Jesse Rosenfeld – who has previously written for +972, The Nation, and Al Jazeera – fails to inform readers of Palestinian rejectionism, payments of salaries to convicted terrorists, or the effect of terror on Israeli society.

Instead, Rosenfeld portrays “Gen Z” terrorists as having no alternative but to take up arms against Israeli civilians: “‘Israel has left us no choice,’” he quotes his 22 year-old interview subject, a member of a Jenin-based terror cell, saying. “‘The occupation has proven that the more we are silent, the more it will take from us.’” What Israel has attempted to give to the Palestinians – that is, independence – isn’t mentioned.

And at the same time, the article portrays Israeli actions as wantonly evil. (“Generals, Peaceniks, and Palestinian Fighters Agree: Bibi Must Be Stopped,” July 22, reprinted on Yahoo.)

The piece brings to mind the adage that “a half-truth is a whole lie.” Consider the following passage from Rosenfeld’s article:

Elias and Mohammad al-Ashqar are in a state of shock. Sitting in the living room of their modest ground-floor family apartment in the Askar refugee camp on a brisk winter evening, they are surrounded by men from the community. The al-Ashqar brothers’ father, 61-year-old Abdel Hadi, had been shot and killed during an Israeli-army raid in the adjacent northern West Bank city of Nablus hours earlier.

The Israeli army stormed the crowded city at 10 a.m., opening fire as residents scrambled, abandoning their midmorning shopping to run for their lives down the winding streets.

Several paragraphs later, Rosenfeld does add that “the bloody Feb. 22 raid-turned-firefight was directed against the Lions’ Den.” From his description of events, however, a reader could easily think the IDF opened fire on Palestinian civilians for no reason at all. In fact, the Times of Israel reported, “The Israel Defense Forces said troops had entered Nablus to arrest [Hussam Bassam] Isleem, a senior member of the Lion’s Den terror group, who was allegedly the third member of a cell that killed Staff Sgt. Ido Baruch during a shooting attack in October.” According to a military source, “soldiers surrounded a home where three suspects, all members of the Lion’s Den terror group, were holed up, demanding they turn themselves in,” a gun battle broke out between the members of the terror cell and the IDF, and civilians were tragically killed in the crossfire. But Rolling Stone would prefer its readers to think the Ashqar brothers’ grief is solely a result of gratuitous Israeli violence.

This is typical of the nature of the entire piece, which is so one-sided as to be grossly dishonest. As another example, Rosenfeld tells us that in 2022, “29 Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks.” But he did not humanize a single one of those Israelis, or the 20 civilians, including four children, that were killed so far in 2023, with the kind of story that he told about the Ashqar family. Posting the article, Rosenfeld tweeted, “I spoke to Palestinian fighters, leaders and occupied residents; former Israeli PM’s, a Shin Bet officer, a General and an army refusnik for this @RollingStone long read about Palestinian revolt in West Bank and unprecedented mass protest in Israel.” But he doesn’t appear to have spoken to any of the Israelis whose family members were lost to the terrorism he glamorizes, or those whose day-to-day lives have been damaged because of it.

Nor does he, in a 6000-word piece that took several months to report, relay any conversations with any members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own party, or with any of the approximately one million Israelis who voted for it. He does, however, speak to many Israelis who oppose Netanyahu. The Palestinian Authority has exacted retribution on its critics in the past, which is presumably at least one reason why Rosenfeld’s Palestinian interview subject “Abu Nidal,” uses a pseudonym. But the many opponents of the Netanyahu government in Israel, including his political rivals, feel free to speak openly to Rosenfeld, who obligingly quotes them at length and uncritically. They know that no harm will come to them as a result of their words….

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump Wants Boston Marathon Bomber to Get Death Penalty. Dems Want Him to Vote.

My latest in PJ Media:

Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson, an Obama appointee to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, on Friday overturned the death sentence of Boston Marathon jihad bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. President Trump is unhappy. Early Sunday morning he tweeted: “Death penalty! He killed and badly wounded many. Justice!”

Democrats, in contrast, appear to be fine with Thompson’s decision, as some Democratic leaders are on record saying not only that Tsarnaev should not be put to death, but that he should vote.

As far as Trump is concerned, this is still a live issue despite Thompson’s ruling. On Sunday afternoon he followed up his initial tweet with two more, saying: “Rarely has anybody deserved the death penalty more than the Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The court agreed that this ‘was one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks since the 9/11 atrocities’. Yet the appellate court tossed out the death sentence. So many lives lost and ruined. The Federal Government must again seek the Death Penalty in a do-over of that chapter of the original trial. Our Country cannot let the appellate decision stand. Also, it is ridiculous that this process is taking so long!”

Trump also took this question right to the Democrats, saying after the ruling was announced on Friday: “They protect criminals and Biden opposes the death penalty, even for cop killers and child murderers.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a child murderer, as one of his victims in the Marathon bombings was an eight-year-old boy named Martin Richard.

But the Democrats nevertheless want Dzhokhar Tsarnaev alive, well, and voting a straight Democrat ticket. Back in April 2019, Bernie Sanders came out for restoring voting rights for convicted felons. He was asked if he believed that even “terrible people,” including convicted murderers such as Tsarnaev, should have the right to vote. Sanders was unequivocal: “Yes, even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, ‘Well, that guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote. Well, that person did that. Not going to let that person vote,’ you’re running down a slippery slope.”

Vice Presidential contender Kamala Harris agreed, albeit somewhat more equivocally: “I think we should have that conversation,” she said, adding: “I have long been an advocate of making sure people formerly incarcerated are not denied the right to vote. In some states they’re permanently deprived of the right to vote.”

There is much more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Terrorists and Their Textbooks

What do the Boston Bombers have to do with a Holt McDougal textbook titled “Modern World History: Patterns of Interaction” used in their high school?

This brief film illustrates how Islam-biased content in K-12 history and geography textbooks can indoctrinate and radicalize our children, causing some of them to evolve into homegrown terrorists. By quietly getting major textbook publishers to include language that enhances Islam, while demeaning Christianity and Judaism, Islamists are attempting to win the hearts and minds of America’s middle- and high-school students.

In the film, Citizens for National Security (CFNS) connects the dots between our country’s classrooms and acts of terrorism.

RELATED ARTICLE: Dealing with Terrorism without Falling into its Trap

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Insincere Apology

maraton_de_boston_t670x470

Scene from Boston Bombing.

How can a jihadi repent for his jihad? My latest in FrontPage:

“Tsarnaev apologizes for Boston Marathon bombing,” trumpeted the Boston GlobeWednesday, and certainly the young jihad murderer talked a good game: “I would like to apologize to the victims and the survivors,” he said. “I am sorry for the lives I have taken, for the suffering I have caused, and for the terrible damage I have done.” The only problem with these tardy words was that they were almost certainly insincere.

Tsarnaev gave a hint of the likelihood that his tears of repentance were of the reptilian variety when he added: “I am Muslim. My religion is Islam. I pray to Allah to bestow his mercy on those affected in the bombing and their families. I pray for your healing.”

Healing from what? The physical and emotional wounds he inflicted upon them in the name of Allah, and in his service. As prosecutors argued in April that he deserved the death penalty, they released a video of Tsarnaev three months after his attack, looking into the security camera in his cell, primping his hair in the reflection, and then flashing the V sign and then giving his middle finger to his jailers.

And why not? He believed he had done a righteous deed. The motivations of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev became clear very quickly after Dzhokhar was apprehended. CNN reported a week after the bombings that “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, has said his brother—who was killed early Friday—wanted to defend Islam from attack.”

And just before he was captured, when he was hiding out inside a pleasure boat, Dzhokhar wrote a long self-justification on the inside of the boat, including the line: “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims.”

It came to light soon after the bombings that on a Russian-language social media page Dzhokhar had featured a drawing of a bomb under the heading “send a gift,” and just above links to sites about Islam. Tamerlan’s YouTube page contained two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Feiz Mohammed “urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.”

Tamerlan also said, “I’m very religious.” His friend Donald Larking affirmed this. “Tamerlan Tsarnaev was my friend and we talked about everything from politics to religion,” according to Larking. “He was very, very religious. He believed that the Qur’an was the one true word and he loved it.” Tamerlan did not drink alcohol because Allah forbade it—“God said no alcohol”—and his Italian girlfriend had converted to Islam, as his American wife did later.

The Boston Marathon bombs were similar to IEDs that jihadis used in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square in the summer of 2010, also used a similar bomb. The instructions for making such a bomb had even been published in al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine.

Not only were the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers abundantly clear; it is likely that they were actually tied in somehow to the international jihad network—as was indicated by how they fought off Boston police early on the Friday after the Marathon bombings with military-grade explosives. The question of where they got those explosives has never been answered. Nor has it ever been explained where the brothers got the military training that they reportedly displayed during the fight against police before Tamerlan was killed and Dzhokhar was captured.

And now Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is repentant? Why would he be? The only possibility for that would be if he is losing the faith that led him to think mass murder at the Boston Marathon would bring him heavenly reward, and he ruled that out at his sentencing Wednesday when he said, “I am Muslim. My religion is Islam.”

Why, then, did he express remorse for the bombing? Maybe he wanted to stave off the death penalty – or maybe he wanted to aid in that primary work of Muslim spokesmen in the West: polishing the ever-tarnished image of Islam, tarnished in this case by his jihad murders. Whatever Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have calculated when, during the long hours in his cell, he decided to express remorse, a sincere rejection of his act is the least likely possibility. Much more likely was the possibility that he was suddenly been overcome with a decidedly un-jihadi fear of death.

“I ask Allah to have mercy on me, my brother, and my family,” Tsarnaev said Wednesday. For his jihad, or for his repentance? The latter is more likely.

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The Boston Globe on June 24th, 2015 reported:

An emotional Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev apologized Wednesday at his sentencing hearing for the April 2013 terror attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

“I would like to apologize to the victims and the survivors,” said Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death. “I did do it.”

“I am sorry for the lives I have taken, for the suffering I have caused, and for the terrible damage I have done,” he said. He was hunched over and spoke with a slight accent.

It was the first time Tsarnaev’s voice has been heard in federal court in Boston, other than to enter his not-guilty plea. His statement came after hours of heartwrenching testimony from relatives of those killed in the bombing and survivors of the blasts.

“I am Muslim. My religion is Islam. I pray to Allah to bestow his mercy on those affected in the bombing and their families,” he said. “I pray for your healing.” [Emphasis added]

Islam had nothing to do with the Boston bombings – seriously?

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Before Boston bombing, Tsarnaev’s wife searched for “wife of mujaheddin”

Complicit. “‘Wife of Mujahedeen’: Jury Hears New Details About Boston Bomber’s Wife,” by Michele McPhee, ABC News, April 28, 2015:

In the months before the Boston Marathon bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife, Katherine Russell, searched the Internet for “wife of mujahedeen” and “what are the rewards for wives of mujahedeen,” according to testimony in the bomber trial Tuesday.

After the April 2013 attacks, Russell, who now uses her married name Karima Tsarnaeva, exchanged texts with her best friend about the carnage at the finish line and wrote, “Although a lot more people are killed every day in Syria and other places. Innocent people.”

“I thought it was strange she was bringing that up in this situation,” the friend, Gina Crawford, told the court Monday. Crawford said she had been interviewed by the FBI twice in 2013.

Katherine Russell has not been charged in connection with the April 15, 2013 bombings that killed three, left another 17 amputees, and wounded more than 240 others. Law enforcement officials told ABC News they are continuing to investigate what role, if any, she played in the conspiracy.

Russell’s name has been brought up several times during the penalty phase of the trial by ’s defense team as they try to save him from the death penalty by painting his older brother Tamerlan as the architect of the attacks.Tamerlan, 26, was killed in the early hours of April 19, 2013 when he was shot in a wild firefight with police and then hit and dragged by his brother as Dzhokhar fled in a stolen SUV from the scene in the Boston suburb of Watertown. Tamerlan’s death capped a two-day crime spree that started with the murder of MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, the carjacking of a Cambridge businessman, and the bomb and bullet battle in Watertown. Dzhokhar was discovered hours later hiding and wounded in a dry-docket boat.

“The man who conceived, planned, and led this crime is beyond our power to punish,” defense attorney David Bruck told the court in his opening statement Monday, referring to Tamerlan. “Only the 19-year-old brother [Dzhokhar] who helped is left.”

PHOTO: A runner is on the ground as police officers draw their guns after the second explosion near the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon, April 15, 2013.
John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
PHOTO: A runner is on the ground as police officers draw their guns after the second explosion near the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon, April 15, 2013.

Katherine Russell’s mother Judith, a nurse, also took the stand for the defense Monday and said that her daughter met Tamerlan at a nightclub while she was a student at Suffolk University. Katherine brought Tamerlan home to meet her mother in a meeting that left Judith Russell unimpressed, she testified.

“He didn’t really seem interested in getting to know us, so it didn’t start off on a really good feeling,” Judith Russell told the court. “We weren’t real happy with her choice in the relationship.”

After Tamerlan traveled to Russia in 2012 the couple’s interest in Islam intensified, she said. With Tamerlan, she said, it bordered on “obsession.”

“She was covering and he started to grow his body hair,” Judith Russell said. “There was progression of his belief system and passion.”

After Tamerlan was killed, Judith woke up to her other daughter crying. Judith asked Russell’s sister, “I wanted to know what was going on, and she said, ‘Katie thinks that Tamerlan’s dead.’”…

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WARNING: More jihad attacks! How the FBI could have stopped the Boston bombing

Yesterday on The 700 Club with Pat Robertson. More information here. Get the book Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In, which fully exposes the denial and willful ignorance of government, law enforcement, and the mainstream media, here.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Ingfbruno. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Officials warn that more Boston Marathon-type jihadis lurk

Of course they do. Authorities are aware that they’re out there, but they’re hamstrung in their ability to track their activities by the politically correct willful ignorance about their motives and goals, imposed by the Obama Administration in October 2011 — as I explain at length in my book Arab Winter Comes to America. And so there is one certainty: there will be more jihad attacks like the one at the Boston Marathon, while FBI agents are busy engaging in “outreach” with jihad terror-tied mosques.

“More Boston bomber types lurk, officials warn,” by Kelly Riddell for The Washington Times, April 14:

The Boston Marathon bombings last year put a new face on terrorism: that of young, U.S.-raised misfits in search of a cause for which they can kill and die thousands of miles away from hotbeds of Islamic radicalism.

Feeling disenfranchised and alone, these youths often seek community online, placing themselves into a guerrilla’s mindset by consuming information on specific movements and gradually becoming self-radicalized, counterterrorism researchers say. Al Qaeda, becoming increasingly diffuse and decentralized, tries to help these individuals in their process through online magazines such as Inspire and jihadist postings on YouTube.

“Al Qaeda still exists, but its ability to reach into the U.S. is very limited — mainly because of the job law enforcement has done,” said Christopher Swift, an adjunct professor of national security studies at Georgetown University. “On the Internet, [al Qaeda’s] looking for someone who is isolated, atomized — that they can indoctrinate but don’t have to take responsibility for — someone [to] whom they can push out the ideological source code and have act in their name. We’re going to see this ‘lone wolf’ model proliferate.”

Law enforcement officers have taken note.

“We have to have a recognition — and we do — that terrorists are more agile, they’re not restricted by nation-states and borders, they can flow information in and out of different areas of the world at will,” said Michael Steinbach, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division. “No longer does somebody in country X need to travel to a terrorist hotbed to get trained and get their orders. You can really do everything that needs to be done without leaving your home, let alone the United States.”…

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers accused of the Boston Marathon bombings, seemed to have become radicalized in 2011 while he was living in a suburb of the city, according to a congressional report released in March.

By all accounts, Tsarnaev was a volatile young man, accused of domestic violence against a girlfriend, and was thrown out of his local mosque several times for getting into shouting matches with preachers because they encouraged worshippers to celebrate American holidays, according to the report.

When law enforcement personnel searched Tsarnaev’s computer, they found a YouTube account with various Russian-language videos on Islam and playlists of jihadist instructions. One 13-minute video, titled “The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags of Khorasan,” detailed a jihadist prophecy that at the end of the world a holy army would rise out of the region historically associated with Afghanistan and sweep across the Middle East to Jerusalem, according to the congressional report.

Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police in a Boston suburb days after the bombings.

Briefly raised in the Russian republic of Dagestan, an epicenter of Islamic insurgency, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, seemingly had no specific investment in their former homeland’s battles, Mr. Swift said, but they were inspired and ideologically driven by al Qaeda’s call for global jihad via the Internet.

“If you look at the Tsarnaev brothers, they hadn’t been to Chechnya since they were kids — this wasn’t about what Russia’s done to Chechnya and the suffering of the Chechnyan people,” said Mr. Swift. “These individuals already had some other issue, and then went online and glommed onto this understanding of the world. The Internet gives people who are already vulnerable [to jihad] a pathway and a recipe to follow.”

Swift is wrong. Tamerlan was in that region as an adult, trying to join “underground groups” because of his commitment to “radical Islam” — as the Russians told the FBI.

Not all background information has been released on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as he awaits trial on multiple federal charges, including the denotation of two improvised explosive devices — built with pressure cookers and packed with shrapnel — that exploded near the end of the finish line of the Boston Marathon last year….

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by Ike Pius. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Russia told FBI in 2011 that Tsarnaev was “follower of radical Islam and a strong believer”

News about this new report is circulating as an exoneration of the FBI, as it is referred to explicitly in the last paragraph of this New York Times report. However, it is not really an exoneration at all. It is an attempt to displace blame for the FBI’s dropping the ball on watching Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the Boston Marathon jihad bombing from the FBI to the Russians. The problem with this attempt, however, is that while the report says that the Russians refused to give the FBI further information, it acknowledges that they told the feds that Tamerlan Tsarnaev “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer” and that he “had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

Those “underground groups” could in this context only have been a reference to jihad groups. And so the Russians essentially told the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a jihadi, and that wasn’t enough for the FBI to keep him under close surveillance? They didn’t pursue watching him and his brother because they hadn’t “found anything substantive that ties them to a terrorist group.” The possibility that they could have pulled off a lone wolf jihad attack apparently didn’t occur to these intel experts.

The FBI clearly failed in this case and bears some responsibility for the Boston bombing, but ultimately the responsibility lies with Barack Obama and John Brennan, who made sure that agents would be abysmally ignorant of Islam and jihad when they scrubbed all mention of both from counterterror training — so how could the FBI properly evaluate what the Russians told them?

“Russia Didn’t Share All Details on Boston Bombing Suspect, Report Says,” by Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt for the New York Times, April 9:

WASHINGTON — The Russian government declined to provide the F.B.I. with information about one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects that would most likely have led to more extensive scrutiny of him at least two years before the attack, according to an inspector general’s report.

Russian officials had told the F.B.I. in 2011 that the suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer” and that Mr. Tsarnaev “had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

But after an initial investigation by the F.B.I., the Russians declined several requests for additional information about Mr. Tsarnaev, according to the report, a review of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies could have thwarted the bombing.

At the time, American law enforcement officials believed that Mr. Tsarnaev posed a far greater threat to Russia.

The new inspector general’s report found that it was only after the bombing occurred last April that the Russians shared with the F.B.I. the additional intelligence, including information from a telephone conversation the Russian authorities had intercepted between Mr. Tsarnaev and his mother in which they discussed Islamic jihad.

“They found that the Russians did not provide all the information that they had on him back then, and based on everything that was available the F.B.I. did all that it could,” said a senior American official briefed on the review.

Mr. Tsarnaev, who was killed attempting to elude the police, and his brother, Dzhokhar, are believed to be the sole suspects in the attack, which killed three people and injured more than 200 near the marathon’s finish line. The Justice Department said in January that it would seek the death penalty against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Federal authorities have uncovered little evidence tying the brothers to an international terrorist organization. F.B.I. agents who traveled to Dagestan, a region in Russia’s North Caucasus where Tamerlan Tsarnaev went in 2012 during a particularly violent period there, found nothing that showed he received training or encouragement from terrorists.

“At this point it looks like they were homegrown violent extremists,” the senior official said. “We certainly aren’t in a position to rule anything out, but at this point we haven’t found anything substantive that ties them to a terrorist group.”

The report was produced by the inspector general of the Intelligence Community, which has responsibility for 17 separate agencies, and the inspectors general from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. It has not been made public, but members of Congress are scheduled to be briefed on it Thursday, and some of its findings are expected to be released before Tuesday, the first anniversary of the bombings.

Its contents were described by several senior American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report has not been publicly released.

The review is similar to an internal review the F.B.I. conducted after the bombing. In that review, the bureau found that its agents had been restrained from conducting a more extensive investigation because of federal laws and Justice Department guidelines that prevent them from using surveillance tools like wiretapping in investigations like those conducted on Mr. Tsarnaev before the bombings.

“Had they known what the Russians knew they probably would have been able to do more under our investigative guidelines, but would they have uncovered the plot? That’s very hard to say,” one senior official said.

While the review largely exonerates the F.B.I., it does say that agents in the Boston area who investigated the Russian intelligence in 2011 could have conducted a few more interviews when they first examined the information.

The report also recommends several steps it says the F.B.I. should take to more effectively share information with state and local authorities, the officials said. The F.B.I., which has worked with police chiefs from around the country over the past year on how it can better share information, has already adopted several of the recommendations, according to the officials.

When the F.B.I. disclosed shortly after the bombing that it had received information from the Russians, congressional Republicans and a few Democrats, including Representative William Keating of Massachusetts, criticized the bureau for not continuing to track him when he left to visit Dagestan and for not questioning him on his return in 2012.

“It’s people like this that you don’t want to let out of your sight, and this was a mistake,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “I don’t know if our laws were inefficient or if the F.B.I. failed, but we’re at war with radical Islamists, and we need to up our game.”

As part of its investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, F.B.I. agents examined his criminal and educational records and his Internet search history. They also interviewed him, his parents and people at his school. It was after those investigative efforts uncovered little that F.B.I. agents stationed in Moscow went back to the Russian authorities and requested any additional information they had on Mr. Tsarnaev, who immigrated to the United States from Dagestan a little more than a decade ago.

The exoneration of the F.B.I. stands in contrast to the findings of a similar investigation conducted after the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., in which 13 people were killed. After the shooting, a former bureau director, William H. Webster, conducted a formal review of the investigation into the gunman, Nidal Malik Hasan, before and after the attack. That review said the F.B.I. had mishandled information garnered from intelligence, and it led to changes in the way the agency shares information.

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Jihad comes to Boston: The Chechnya Connection

Fox News reports, “Ties between Islamic extremist groups and Chechnya well-documented. [C]ongressional researchers and foreign policy analysts have long tracked a connection between the Chechnya region and Islamic extremists with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. If the suspects are indeed Chechen, analysts told Fox News they may represent part of a jihadi network which has made its way to American soil. “The Chechen jihadi network is very extensive,” Middle East analyst Walid Phares said Friday. “They have a huge network inside Russia and Chechnya.”

Chris Kyle in his autobiography American Sniper wrote that during the 2006 battle of in Ramadi,  Iraq, “I saw a whole bunch of guys standing there in desert camouflage—the old brown chocolate-chip stuff from Desert Storm, the First Gulf War. They were all wearing gear. They were all Caucasian, including one or two with blond hair, obviously not Iraqis or Arabs… We looked at each other. Something flicked in my brain, and I flicked the trigger on the M-16, mowing them down. A half-second’s more hesitation, and I would have been the one bleeding out on the floor. They turned out to be Chechens, Muslims apparently recruited for a holy war against the West. (We found their passports after searching the house.)” [My emphasis]

Clare Lopez, former CIA  Operations officer and Russia expert, in a statement to WDW noted, “This attack is not about Russia. This is an act of jihad. As time goes on our best friends are the media who will get into the background of these two men and reveal the truth.”

Time/Yahoo News reports:

Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout earlier today, appears to have been sympathetic to Islamist radicalism. Five months ago he appears to have created a channel on YouTube called “Terrorists.” The channel features videos from the one of the leaders of the insurgency in Dagestan who goes by the name Amir Abu Dudzhan. YouTube appears to have removed two of the videos but in a third features Dudzhan calling for jihad. Holding a Kalashnikov rifle, he says, “Jihad is the duty of every able-bodied Muslim.” Among the other videos on his channel is one of Timur Mutsuraev, the bard of the Chechen resistance in the 1990s; it features his song, “We will devote our lives to jihad.” See Tamerlan’s video list here.

Here is the video on  Tamerlan’s YouTube channel calling for jihad by Amir Abu Dujana Rabbanikaly:

Reuters reports:

“Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev posted links to Islamic websites and others calling for Chechen independence on what appears to be his page on a Russian language social networking site.

Abusive comments in Russian and English were flooding onto Tsarnaev’s page on VK, a Russian-language social media site, on Friday after he was identified as a suspect in the bombing of the Boston marathon.

Police launched a massive manhunt for Tsarnaev, 19, after killing his older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a shootout overnight.”

Click on image for a larger view.

According to Reuters:

On the site, the younger Tsarnaev identifies himself as a 2011 graduate of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a public school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His “World view” is listed as “Islam” and his “Personal priority” is “career and money”.

He has posted links to videos of fighters in the Syrian civil war and to Islamic web pages with titles like “Salamworld, my religion is Islam” and “There is no God but Allah, let that ring out in our hearts”.

He also has links to pages calling for independence for Chechnya, a region of Russia that lost its bid for secession after two wars in the 1990s.

The page also reveals a sense of humor, around his identity as a member of a minority from southern Russia’s restive Caucasus, which includes Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and other predominately Muslim regions that have seen two decades of unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union.

A video labelled “tormenting my brother” shows a man resembling his dead brother Tamerlan laughing and imitating the accents of different Caucasian ethnic groups.

The Washington Post provides this background on Chechnya:

The Chechen conflict dates to the early 1990s. In the summer of 1999, fighters in the predominantly Muslim republic rose up in an attempt to throw off Russian domination. Vladimir Putin, then the Russian prime minister, responded quickly, firmly and brutally to put down the rebellion.

Later that summer, there were several explosions across Russia and Putin blamed Chechens. Putin sent the army back by force, which resulted in Western criticism of Russian tactics and human rights violations.

In the most dramatic episode, about 40 armed Chechen separatists took more than 900 hostages at a Moscow theater. After a two-day siege, Russian special police pumped a chemical agent into the theater’s ventilation system and raided the building. About 130 hostages died, and all of the Chechens were killed.

Though the war has officially ended, the Russians have maintained a tight grip on Chechnya, backing a strongman friendly to Moscow and maintaining a robust military presence. Efforts have also been underway in recent years to rebuild the shattered capital of Grozny.

Still, sporadic violence and kidnapping have continued in Chechnya and separatists retain a following. The years of fighting, crime and economic difficulties led tens of thousands of Chechens to leave their homes for other former Soviet republics.