Saturday, April 20, 2013

Matt 24 watch, 208: Boston bombing details emerge -- a case of media-assisted taqiyya? (Also, we need to attend to disturbing underlying trends possibly linked to the case and pointed to by Reza Kahlili)

Things have begun to settle down in Boston after a hectic and horrific week. 

It is time to follow-up on the initial KF summary, as this case is significant and throws light on trends we will increasingly have to address. The intent, is to summarise again based on what seems credible, as we have a need to inform ourselves and understand our times in order to act sensibly and prudently. 

Naively swimming in deep, troubled, dangerous waters with big sharks lurking, is unwise.

It seems that, once the FBI put up pictures of suspects online, the pressure was on on the Boston Marathon Bombers, and after a sadly murderous crime spree and shootouts followed by a manhunt, the older brother [Tamerlan: black cap . . . ] is dead, the younger [Dzhokhar: white cap . . . ] captured hiding in a boat just outside the Watertown perimeter, while apparently wounded.

The suspect bombers (apparently, they are said to have told their carjack victim that they did the deed)

 Video on the capture:



A clip:
A homeowner on Franklin Street went into his yard after being inside all day. According to police, he noticed a rip in the tarp that covered his boat and saw blood on the boat. Upon looking inside, he saw a man covered in blood.

The homeowner then called 911.

According to CBS News’ John Miller, three Boston police officers responded to the yard and saw the bloody suspect. Before they could call for backup, the suspect popped up from the boat and opened fire.

Officers returned fire. It is unclear if Tsarnaev was injured in that exchange, or if all of his injuries were sustained in a gunfight early Friday morning in another Watertown neighborhood.

The gunfight ended in the capture of the wounded suspect.

Bit by bit, through media interviews of family, friends and acquaintances, and examination of social media sites etc, a picture on the context of the news events is slowly emerging:


1 --> The brothers have apparently been in the USA for about a decade, joining family there in the aftermath of the Russia-Chechen wars in and around their homeland. That would make the older about 16 years old then, and the younger about 9 at the time.

2 --> They are reportedly Muslim (with hints of IslamISM), and evidently ethnically Chechen.

3 --> The older brother (the boxer) seemed to be drifting in life, though reportedly married to a young woman living in Rhode Island who converted to Islam to become his wife. They have a daughter, 3 years of age. He claimed not to have a single American friend. (That, I assume excludes wife and the in-laws who seem to have graciously accommodated him. Maybe, something was lost in translation of this thoughts into English. However, this may be a clue on the religious -- indeed, Quranic -- injunction to Muslims not to befriend infidels. [Some interpret this as meaning, those "infidels" who are at war with Islam, but that should be tempered by our reckoning with the common understanding that the world is divided into the house of Submission [Islam] and the House of War [Dar ul Harb] with a perpetual war until the latter is defeated by the Mahdi.])

4 --> The younger, seemed to acquaintances to be a typical kid on the block or in the school, a wrestler, a bright student, and then a college student living on Dorm and being friendly, with an eye for the girls.

5 --> There is a suspicion that  there may have been adverse influence from the older brother. Certainly, it is significant to see the following admission from the FBI, as reported by CBS News, in a context where other known cases of violent IslamIST extremism also mounted to the level of investigation that failed to provide clear links:
The FBI admitted Friday they interviewed the now-deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev two years ago and failed to find any incriminating information about him.  

As first reported by CBS News correspondent Bob Orr, the FBI interviewed Tsarnaev, the elder brother of at-large bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, at the request of a foreign government to see if he had any extremist ties, but failed to find any linkage.
Both Tsarnaev brothers were legal permanent residents of the U.S. There is no evidence so far that either brother received any tactical training.
CBS News correspondent John Miller reports it is likely Russia asked to have the elder Tsarnaev vetted because of suspected ties to Chechen extremists.
The FBI is likely to have run a background check, running his name through all the relevant databases, including those of other agencies, checking on his communications and all of his overseas travel. Miller reports that culminated in a sit-down interview where they probably asked him a lot of questions about his life, his contacts, his surroundings. All of this was then written in a report and sent it to the requesting government.
This is an issue they've had in the past. They interviewed Carlos Bledsoe in Little Rock, Ark., before he shot up an Army recruiting station in 2009. They were also looking into Major Hasan Nadal before the Fort Hood shootings.
However, the FBI has maintained in those incidents that they took all the steps they were asked to and were allowed to under the law.
6 --> Russia Today has an interview with the mother of the suspects that is inadvertently revealing. Through the protests of innocence of her sons and accusations of FBI set-ups, we can discern a pattern of radicalisation and coming to the attention of law enforcement:
 Zubeidat Tsarnaeva maintains her younger son is innocent and like so many of the brothers’ acquaintances, claims they were good, courteous kids and model students – especially the younger 19-year-old Dzhokhar. A US citizen who is presently in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, she revealed to RT some suspicions of her own . . . . 

Grief-stricken at the latest developments in the case, Zubeidat expressed her dismay at the allegations, recounting Dzhokhar’s life in the US and talking of his status among his peers and friends: he was an honors student, loved by many of his friends and teachers. And his older brother Tamerlan was a star athlete and student, whose ambition was to one day appear on the US Olympic wrestling team.

But her biggest suspicion surrounding the case was the constant FBI surveillance she said her family was subjected to over the years. She is surprised that having been so stringent with the entire family, the FBI had no idea the sons were supposedly planning a terrorist act.

They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me…they were telling me that he [the older, 26-y/o Tamerlan] was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites… they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step…and now they say that this is a terrorist act! Never ever is this true, my sons are innocent!”
When asked if maybe she didn’t know about some of her sons’ more secret aspirations and dark secrets, she said “That’s impossible. My sons would never keep a secret.”

Finally, she said that if she could speak to her youngest – Dzhokhar, she would tell him, “Save your life and tell the truth, that you haven’t done anything, that this is a set up!”
7--> RT Vid:

8 --> However, Ben Shapiro of Breitbart summarises a timeline that we may need to refer to in upcoming days and months:
. . . December 2005: Uncle Ruslan Tsarni sees Tamerlan and Dzhokhar for the last time. “My family has nothing to do with that family,” he said.


2008-2009: Tamerlan is studying engineering at Bunker Hill Community College when he is profiled by photographer Johannes Hirn. In that profile, Tamerlan says he is devoutly religious, has abandoned smoking and drinking, and rips into the United States. “I’m very religious,” he explains. “There are no values anymore … People can’t control themselves.”


2009: Tamerlan fights in the Golden Gloves tournament in Salt Lake City, loses. That same year, he is arrested for assault in a domestic dispute with his girlfriend.


2010: According to the aunt of the suspects, Maret Tsarnaeva, Tamerlan fathers a 3-year-old daughter. There is no confirming evidence of this. [--> Cf the above] That same year, Tamerlan tells a Boston University student magazine: “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”


2011: According to Maret, Tamerlan begins practicing Islam religiously and praying five times per day.


2011: Dzhokhar graduates from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, listed as a Greater Boston League Winter All-Star Wrestler. He goes on to the University of Massachusetts, studying to be a dentist. Dzhokhar wins a $2,500 scholarship from the City of Cambridge.


August 2012: Ashraful Rahman, a current senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, says he saw Dzhokhar at around this time during Ramadan at mosque. ““Regardless of whether you knew him as well as I did, as someone who wrestled with him, hung out and chilled with him or whether you were people who saw him the hallway, he was always the same — a generally nice guy,” said Rahman . . . . 

September 11, 2012: Dzhokhar becomes a naturalized US citizen. At this point, his brother has his green card.


2012: Zubeidat [mother] is arrested for stealing $1,600 worth of clothes from a Lord & Taylor.


2012-2013: Tamerlan posts videos to YouTube expressing sympathy for Al Qaeda philosophies. He has a video file called “Terrorists.” He shares videos of radical Islamic lectures. One video contains Arabic singing and bombs exploding, with the caption: “Then Allah will rise an army from the non-Arabs, who will be greater riders and will have better weapons than the Arabs … but their weapon will be the weapon of faith.” He is a follower of Feiz Mohammed, a radical Islamic preacher. Sometime in 2012, he travels to Russia for six months.


April 15, 2013: The two brothers allegedly set bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
The profile is that of a somewhat troubled family, with a father who seems to have returned to the homeland ill [c. 2004 - 5], a son adrift who finds himself in the hands of a radical IslamIST circle, and seems to pull in his younger brother with him. At the same time, there is a seemingly smooth surface that seems to conceal the dangers lurking beneath, which accounts well for the astonishment that came out in ever so many news interviews of acquaintances from the schools and neighbourhood. But police or intelligence services in Russia and the US seem to have had an interest in the elder son, for years.

A familiar pattern.

However, there is a deeper factor that we should be aware of.

Taqiyya:
The word "Taqiyya" literally means: "Concealing, precaution, guarding.” It is employed in disguising one's beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies. In practical terms it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking. It is currently employed in fending off and neutralising any criticism of Islam or Muslims. 

Falsehoods told to prevent the denigration of Islam, to protect oneself, or to promote the cause of Islam are sanctioned in the Qur'an and Sunna, including lying under oath in testimony before a court, deceiving by making distorted statements to the media such as the claim that Islam is a “religion of peace”. A Muslim is even permitted to deny or denounce his faith if, in so doing, he protects or furthers the interests of Islam, so long as he remains faithful to Islam in his heart.[Cf discussion here.]
In the face of this known religiously sanctioned subversive praxis, we must be ever on guard, and must not naively venture out into rip-tide zones and deep murky waters where sharks may roam. (Which counsel of course is far, far wider than concerns about IslamISM or even the milder forms of Islam, it holds for anything that seems to be prone to spin tactics in an era of "weapons of mass deception." We must be as wise as serpents, harmless as doves.)

Nor should we simply let this rest at the level of a couple of kids gone spectacularly and sadly bad.

Bomb-making is very hard to do, and even harder to get right. 

(Don't fool yourself through naively taking on board media suggestions that a magazine article is enough to get effectively started in making serious bombs. Some major, careful practice and precautions are needed, and someone amateurishly fooling around with explosives and detonators is liable to blow himself up, real fast.)

These two seem to have made and used quite a few bombs, and were using them with abandon.

There also seems to be a sudden step down from the level of planning and execution in the initial attack, and the panicky crime spree that rapidly led to murder, death and capture across a 24 hour period. That makes me take pause as I read the following remarks by the pseudonymous Reza Kahlili:


The two brothers who set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon Monday were assets of a bigger network out of South Asia and were set up to be burned so there would be no link back to their handlers – and Iran.

As reported exclusively April 16, a source within the Iranian intelligence services told WND that the Islamic regime had links to Monday’s bombings and that Hezbollah terrorists and Quds Forces were involved in the shadows. The information was shared with U.S. officials.

A YouTube video posted apparently by one of the bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, though not yet confirmed, shows a belief in the coming of the Shiites’ 12th Imam, Mahdi, and the rise of an Islamic army with black flags out of Khorasan, a province in Iran.
The mullahs ruling Iran have promoted that same ideology, revealed in their secret documentary “The Coming Is Upon Us.”
. . . . WND’s source said the Chechen brothers were likely recruited and trained by other assets connected with Hezbollah operators with centers in South Asia to carry out their terror attack and then abandoned so there would be no link to Iran.

The regime’s Quds Forces, along with Hezbollah, have long been recruiting and training terrorists with a focus in Herzegovina, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and other parts of the world, extending into Latin America. A new focus in the recruiting is on Sunni Muslims and non-Arabs to avoid any trace back to Iran and Hezbollah and to either present an apparent link to al-Qaida or individuals acting on their own, the source said . . . . 

Another source within Khamenei’s office, as reported exclusively by WND Dec. 11, provided information that Quds Forces had drawn up plans to attack the U.S. from within in 2013. The information, which was shared with U.S. officials, was that because of continuing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program and the push to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, terrorist attacks would seek to create instability in America.
A senior commander of the Islamic regime had warned less than two months ago that terrorism was coming to America.

“If the people of America and Europe do not confront the aggressive policies of their governments, they cannot then remain far from the possible future events (terror attacks),” the regime’s armed forces deputy chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, said in a Feb. 23 interview with Fars News Agency, a media outlet run by the Revolutionary Guards. “Al-Qaida groups and other services which operate for the interests of America (in Syria) will soon change the region of their operations and thereafter create new problems for America and Europe.”

Ayatollah Khamenei, in a speech Wednesday in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, blamed America and Western culture for the world’s problems and compared the Boston terrorism to military actions in Syria, Afghanistan and other troubled Middle East locations.
Do I endorse "Kahlili's" claims as gospel?

No, but I sure think we need to consider them carefully, given the known track record of Iran, Hezbollah and al Qaeda. All, multiplied by a situation where Iran seems to be sprinting hard to cross the nuclear red line just now.

One thing I am sure of, is that the shadowy terrorist leaders in their bunkers and caves are taking due note of how just two active operatives and one street bombing terrorist incident were able to lock down Boston and to tie up huge numbers of security forces, distracting leadership all the way to the White House for the better part of a week.

What would a wave of a few dozen such incidents do, similar to the waves of bombing that have targetted Israel?

Let us be alert, vigilant and prayerful. END