It’s a strange thing to leaf through the many pontifications of a outraged American media class in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings, while riding the rails through a country that is so familiar with terror, and yet responds to it so differently. I’m not referring to the government’s response or the tactics of the armed forces - although much ink can and should be spent on those issues by someone more qualified than myself. Rather, it is about the fact that as I ride this train packed with people from all walks of Israeli life, reading all about the lives, interests, and hobbies of the suspects (dead and alive) in the Boston marathon bombings, I know that not one person around me can name the perpetrators of Israel’s last, major, successful terror attacks. I know because I asked, and was met with blank stares. I didn’t know the answer either until I looked it up. It’s not that the Israeli population is ignorant of the goings-on in their backyard, or has become nonchalant due to the sheer quantity of terror. To the contrary, once I inquired about the victims, a wealth of information poured out: Nearly every single person asked was able to name the Fogel family, the victims of the massacre in Itamar, though not a single one was able to name their murderers. Most were able to describe in detail how terrorists broke into their home and murdered them in their beds and the fact that their corpses were found by the surviving 12-year old daughter. But not one could name the perpetrators, who have since pled guilty, professed their pride, and even reenacted the murders for Israeli security services. And it is no wonder.As American pundits trip over themselves attempting to discover what shampoo the Boston terrorists used as a means to better understand them, Israelis are considerably more interested in the victims of the terror.Perhaps that is because Israelis are sickeningly familiar with the horrifying impetus behind their enemies’ actions and do not need to try and understand the motivation. Just as Boston doctors have recently credited in-part triage training that they received from Israeli specialists with their admirable response, and American law enforcement often borrows tactics from their Israeli counter-terror peers, it would behoove the American public to similarly adopt the reality that Israelis have long since accepted. One prominent Canadian politician, Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau, is rightly feeling the heat for suggesting that if he were prime minister he would attempt to examine the exclusion from society that the Boston Marathon terrorists apparently felt. One of the terrorists turned out to be a promising and celebrated boxer; his brother, an American citizen, a scholarship-winner, with no shortage of shocked American peers who were all too eager to express their trauma to a hungry news media, and millions of Americans looking for answers in all of the wrong places. When these attacks aren’t being explained by societal exclusion, they’re being dismissed as the result of foreign policy decisions. To employ another Canadian example, the terror cell known as “The Toronto 18” intended to storm parliament hill and behead the Canadian prime minister, (in protest to the West’s occupation of Afghanistan.) There was no shortage of pundits on hand to explain how the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan has invited terror as a form of resistance, yet people fail to recall that terror long predates either campaign. Americans must understand, as Israelis have, that it isn’t the victim –in this case the West—that must change in order for terror to end. There is little to suggest that the Boston Marathon bombers weren’t given enough hugs as children, or that they didn’t get enough gold stars on their book reports, or indeed, that they would have abandoned their murderous ways if only America had taken the 9/11 attacks on the chin instead of hunting the murderers of over 3,000 innocents and those that harbored them. As every Israeli well knows, concessions don’t stop Islamist terror because these terrorists are not at war with a specific policy and neither are they driven to murder by a feeling of exclusion. Theirs is a Jihad, an ideological struggle, and they know exactly who and what they are at war with. “I don’t have a single American friend,” said the elder of the two bombers, adding that he “doesn’t understand them.” His grievances with his American peers included a feeling that “There are no values anymore…people can’t control themselves.” After all, he pointed out, “God said, ‘no alcohol.’”Search no further for a motive. Look for no solace in the details, a rational, reasonable provocation will not be found. No change in American society will ensure security from terror.The bombers were at war with the very essence, the core, of American liberty as laid out in the constitution that the younger one swore to defend as he accepted American citizenship on the 11th of September (apparently with no compunctions, or appreciation, for the irony of the date).To paraphrase one of the authors of that same constitution, Americans shouldn’t seek to identify which essential liberties they must give up to purchase security, lest they deserve neither, and lose both. The 24-hour news cycle would be better filled celebrating the heroic acts of the first responders, the agents of law and order, and the medical staff, who demonstrated the best of America on that bloodied pavement, in those chaotic hospital halls, and in that ensuing manhunt. The 24-hour news cycle would be better filled remembering 8-year old Martin Richards, Chinese exchange student Lu Lingzi, Medford native Krystle Campbell, and MIT police officer Sean Collier. I am sad that I had to search for those names, that I couldn’t readily recall them, when the names Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which are so loathsome to my sensibilities, come so readily to mind.
