It wasn’t Al Qaeda, It was the Golden Gloves.
The investigation is still continuing into the motives and methods
of the two Tsarnaev brothers,
but it may well be that the most terrifying lesson of the Boston Marathon
bombings is that what precipitated it were not exhortations of Al-Qaeda-linked
militants; not the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; not the carnage
wreaked by America’s drones —though all that may have played a follow-up role--but
a decision made by the folks who ran the U.S. Golden Gloves boxing competition
in 2010.
This is according to a must-read article
in the New York Times.
What happened was that in 2010,
the men running the boxing national Tournament of Champions changed the ground
rules so that only American citizens could compete. The result was that several
top amateur boxers were barred--among them, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, a
young man who had immigrated with his family from Kyrgyzstan a few
years earlier and had
just won his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion
of New England.
According to the
Times, that decision was a major blow for Tamerlan. Amateur boxing had become
an intrinsic part of his identity in his new homeland—a sort of emotional underpinning.
He had talked about wanting to represent the U.S. in the Olympics, and then
turn pro.
According to the
Times, who interviewed dozens of people and relatives who had known Tamerlan, “His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing
competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction….”
His views
on Islam became increasingly radical, as did his hostility to the U.S. and its
actions in the Muslim world. Presumably, he also radicalized his younger
brother.
But,
again, all that occurred, said the Times, “only after his more secular dreams
were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.”
On the other hand, an in-depth
piece on the Tsarnaevs by the Washington
Post , makes no mention at all of Tamerlan’s being barred from the
Tournament of Champions. But it does chronicle in tragic detail the way in
which the dream that had brought Tamerlan’s family to the United States in
2004, had slowly tarnished, until it all seemed to fall apart in 2010 and 2011—when
his father, with cancer, divorced his mother, and moved back to Dagestan.
Again-all this on the
heels of Tamerlan’s being barred from the tournament of Champions.
Was
that the precipitating factor that led to the tragedy in Boson? We’ll never know for sure. But that convoluted
and very human tale rings far truer than the facile clichés and pontifications
of the so-called experts on terrorism who filled the media over the past couple
of weeks.
It
also brings home the ultimately impossible task of the 200,000 employees of the
Department of Homeland Security, established after 9/11, with a budget of 50
billion dollars a year—dedicated to protecting Americans from exactly the kind
of terrorist activity as occurred in Boston.
How
do you provide one hundred percent protection to Americans when the decision by
a Golden Gloves official can propel a young man towards violent jihad, much
more effectively than a fatwa from Osama bin Laden himself?
(You
may be interested in an earlier piece I did on the Boston Bombers: America
the Blind.)
