Internet: the real school of terror
Il Giornale, April 22nd, 2013
The most important school of terror is the Internetwhich is indeed the fleshiest flower of the great greenhouse of democracy. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, nineteen year old, the survivor of the two terrorist brothers, had arrived as a refugee in Cambridge, Boston, ten years ago. Therefore the ethnic Chechen, Muslim boy was no older than nine. At the time, he was therefore unlikely a fanatic Nationalist-Islamist terrorist, radicalized by the colours and the odors of his country repressed by Russia. Maybe his brother Tamerlan was expecially since he spent there six months (perhaps of war training) a year ago and who concluded his life as the marathon murderer at 26 just three days ago. It was maybe there that he had decided to become a shahid; but the country where they became radical Islamists is probably not Chechnya.
Conversely, it is the squared, secluded and infinite space of the Internet. The Chechen Mujahedin are therefore right denying through releases the involvement of their organization in the Boston attack: “Chechen fighters – they say – are not waging any military activity against the US, only against Russia”. Basically, the uprooting of youth from war zones like Caucasus (and many more, just think of the East and Africa) and their consequent transfer to liberal, democratic societies, that they deem hostile, makes large room for radicalization which takes place away from their homeland, on the endless shore of the World Wide Web, on radical Islamist sites in particular. These sites provide information concerning ethnic and religious identities and you immediately come across, sometimes by chance, a series of lectures into violence,hymsto death, to martyrdom in the name of one’s own identity and of Allah. These were the sources of radicalization that led the brothers Tsarnaev to terror.
There are objective ties: a Chechen leader known as Khattab is said to have met with Osama Bin Laden during the 1979-89 fighting against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In addition, Chechen fighters battled against the United States alongside Al-Qaida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. The Hamas website shows Chechen martyrs... and so on.Chechens can be toughterrorist.This nonetheless does not prove the existence of a current connection with the homeland. Most of the major websites and blogs of the radical underground in the North Caucasus region disapproves the Boston bombing: they actually fear that due to the attack, the US might join forces with Russia against the Chechens.
Actually, the question that Obama posed, i.e. “Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our community and country resort to such violence?” ismostly answered by webpages, like for instance by Tamerlan’s favorite Internet preacher, Feiz Mohammad, a Lebanese who lives in Sidney; it is to be found in the videos downloaded, in the online tutorial on explosives of the Al Qaeda website magazine “Inspire”; in thousands of anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semite, anti-women, and anti-homosexual rants. Many terrorists are real Americans, who re-learnt their own history through their PC from a Jihadi perspective. A Rand study on the profile of jihadists in the United States showed that 74 percent of those involved in such plots wereAmerican citizens, 49 percent of which born on the US soil, and 49 percent naturalized.
A researcher, Yuri Teper, explains to the Jerusalem Post that the Chechen background makes them– asin the case of the Tsarnaev brothers – more prone to virtual Salafist community. “These brothers are as American as the terrorist who killed the Jewishchildren in France was French”. No foreign country was involved, only the army of virtual Salafist propaganda and its outcomes played a role.