Lessons of Boston
What the fanatics took away

By RALPH PETERS
April 23, 2013



The superb work of our law-enforcement officials in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing ignited a blaze of self-congratulation that obscured the event’s implications.

Yeah, we killed one fanatic and nabbed the other. But our dysfunctional system couldn’t prevent this latest Boston Massacre.

That carnage was a dirt-cheap terrorist triumph. Fanatics will take its lessons to their shriveled jihadi hearts:

Lesson No. 1: Two amateur terrorists can paralyze a major American city for days. The Tsarnaev punks generated global headlines, ran up millions in government expenses, punished a major metro-area economy and disrupted society. And now we’ve got a costly civilian trial to come for the surviving brother — with more headlines to inspire copycats.

We’re relieved that the two young terrorists were “brought to justice” and delude ourselves that we “won.” Uh-uh. At the cost of two expendable young thugs, a few guns and a couple of homemade bombs, radical Islam generated a bloodbath that created genuine terror on our soil.

Al Qaeda and its ilk have long used suicide bombers and doomed assassins to rupture societies in the Middle East, killing tens of thousands of Muslims (a fact we fail to exploit in our lame “information campaigns”). Now the Islamists are in the export business. Expect more of these low-cost, high-return missions within our borders.

Lesson No. 2: The best weapons against targets in the US are disaffected legal immigrants or radicalized native-born converts to jihad. Political correctness — a pathetic fanaticism of our own — and legal paralysis make it virtually impossible to stop legal residents such as the Tsarnaev brothers before they commit a crime.

The FBI questioned Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother, after the Russians asked us to look into his radicalization. (Moscow’s murky role is another story.) It appears that the agents asked him, Are you a Muslim fanatic? To which he replied, No. End of investigation.

Get inside the red-white-and-blue tent legally, and you, the terrorist, have a license to kill.

Lesson No. 3: Our immigration system is one of terrorism’s best allies. Related to the last point, this is a case of just how idiotic a politically correct bureaucracy can be. The father of the Tsarnaev punks only had to declare himself an asylum-seeker afraid for his life in the Russian Federation and our consular officials fell all over themselves to get him to America.

Nobody cared that “fearful” Pops retained his Russian citizenship and passport, then voluntarily returned to Daghestan, a jihad-roiled Russian province, to live. Or that his elder son’s dream vacation appears to have been a terrorist training session.

If you’re a highly educated, ambitious West European who wants to become an American, your chances are near zero. If you’re a radical America-hater from a hostile region, all you have to do is shout that you’re a political refugee and we’ll give you residency and benefits.

There’s no reason that anyone from Chechnya should be granted a US visa. It’s a gangster mini-state (within the Russian Federation) at war with home-grown Islamists. There are no good guys. Chechnya’s sole export besides terror, Chechen mafiosi, make Mexican drug cartels look like Franciscans. And some of the cruelest jihadis our troops faced in Iraq and elsewhere were Chechens who joined al Qaeda.

Lesson No. 4: The more open a society, the more targets it presents. We all failed to see the obvious. Obsessing about attacks on the Super Bowl and other facilities-bound events, we missed the appeal of public displays, such as marathons, as targets: 26 miles of vulnerability, tens of thousands of (mixed sex, scantily clad!) runners and hundreds of thousands of spectators.

We’ve done a good job of protecting hard targets, from stadiums to government offices. But that only deflected the fanatics toward softer targets whose very randomness creates authentic terror. And don’t underestimate the appeal of butchering female athletes, who are almost as terrifying to Islamists as girls in bikinis.


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'Gun control,' and the lessons of Boston


Although the vast majority of the carnage from the terrorism that paralyzed the Boston area for most of last week was committed with bombs, rather than guns, it would be a mistake to believe that these events will not weigh heavily in the gun rights/"gun control" debate. St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner predicted last week, for example, that a push for "gunpowder control" would be one of the results, and within hours, rabidly anti-gun U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) fulfilled that prophecy.

The above articles also addressed angry attacks from left-wing media and anti-gun groups like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence against the NRA, for having lobbied against a requirement for "taggants" (chemical markers used for tracing explosives) in both black powder and modern smokeless powder. This, despite a National Academy of Sciences study finding that incorporating taggants into propellant powder was not only unfeasible, but potentially quite dangerous. One of the lessons of Boston, then, is that the gun prohibitionists will not limit themselves to exploiting shooting victims for their forcible citizen disarmament agenda. When shooting victims grow scarce, bombing victims will have to do--and inconvenient facts will be ignored or distorted.

A second lesson was the terrorists' choice of primary weapon. "Progressive" group, Americans United for Change recently released a video comparing Senator Mitch McConnell (D-KY) to Al-Qaeda (?) for his opposition to the "universal background check" bill. The supposed basis for this comparison was American-born Al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn's (utterly false) claim that aspiring jihadists in the U.S. could buy fully automatic weapons at gun shows, without a background check.

The bombers did indeed obtain guns (source not yet established)--an "arsenal of guns, ammunition, and explosives," according to the New York Times, but when they sought mass casualties, they chose homemade bombs. An attentive pupil might learn from this that "lax gun laws" aren't the boon to terrorists hoping to wreak maximum mayhem that we are asked to believe them to be.

Yet another lesson is the ineffectual nature of "gun control" laws. The accused bombers had their "arsenal" in direct defiance of some of the most draconian state gun laws in the nation. Our astute pupil thus learns that while the saying, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," may be cliched, it is no less valuable a lesson.

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) fervently hopes the next lesson is not widely learned. In fact, she tried to "unteach" the lesson on Fox News Sunday, when Chris Wallace asked her if unarmed Boston-area residents might have been happy to have the means to defend themselves from the terrorists. Here is her response:

Oh, some may have, yes. But if where you're going is do they need an assault weapon? I don't think so.

She went on to channel her inner Joe "Double Barrel" Biden, saying that a shotgun would have a "good defensive effect." What she did not address was the enormous number of law enforcement officers who chose not to rely on the "good defensive effect" of shotguns, and instead chose the AR-15 she wants to ban--that choice very possibly motivated by the fact that, as an experienced cop could tell you, those tend to be among the easiest firearms to shoot both accurately and quickly, which tends to be handy in a fight. The lesson, then, is that so-called "assault weapons" are quite comforting to have when terrorists are running rampant, and the police are running in circles.

The last lesson is on a theme that National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea recently observed on the opposite coast. Mr. Codrea noted that former Los Angeles cop Christopher Dorner--one man--came close to shutting down the second largest city in the nation, and had his former brethren so rattled that they shot up a truck and the two women in it, simply because they thought it looked like Dorner's. Similarly, the two Boston bombers largely succeeded in freezing the Boston metropolitan area, despite a massive police presence and a huge contingent of federal law enforcement muscle (not to mention the National guard of not only Massachusetts, but several other states, as well--oh and did I mention a systematic, and apparently uncontested, campaign of illegal searches and flat out authoritarian bullying, coming close to terrorism itself?).

What's the relevance? If one or two men can so thoroughly shake the security apparatus of the United States, the idea that the Second Amendment's protection against tyranny is outdated, because the U.S. is now a modern superpower, and therefore "resistance is futile," is simply not going to hold up. Imagine, after all, what even a small militia group of perhaps a dozen members could do, if the battle were not between terrorists and a country whose people can still convince themselves that they're relatively free; but between a determined and angry citizenry who will no longer submit to enduring a long train of abuses and usurpations, and the government perpetrating those abuses. Now imagine a couple dozen of those militia groups. Now imagine hundreds of them. As Mr. Codrea states:

The deterrent effect of an armed citizenry as a last resort appeal against tyranny is often derided by those who don’t have a clue about what such individuals could accomplish in defense of their liberties. It’s derided even more strongly, and tellingly, more desperately, by those who do, and who see and are shaken to their cores by the vulnerabilities just one armed former police officer/citizen disarmament zealot has exposed.

And with that final, most important lesson, class is dismissed. Once the people know that they have the power--and the responsibility--to defend their freedom, it's time to move out of the classroom, and to the gun range and training grounds.

You won’t hear that last point from our politically correct authorities or our “experts.” But Freud has more to tell us about Islamist terrorists than any think tank. My suggestion to the feds, if they want to understand why Tamerlan Tsarnaev turned to jihad? Check out this wife-beater’s love life. Scratch a terrorist, find a lonesome perv.

Last week, Islamist fanaticism scored a resounding victory on the cheap. The effectiveness of our manhunt didn’t change that.

Ralph Peters is the author of the forthcoming Civil-War novel “Hell or Richmond.”
Follow @NYPostOpinion

Message I learned is it took 9,000 FREIGHTENED cops to take down one wounded, scared 19 year old.

Boston had more cops running around than the entire Police forces of a couple of states.

Second lesson learned is the administration will stop at nothing to get what they want. Anyone besides me notice Posse Commitatus was ignored?

Third lesson, take out the central Metro camera monitoring station FIRST!

Well, yes. Of course, they didn't know he was wounded, and I don't know how scared the kid was, but the cops had every reason to be a little apprehensive about their future. After all, they were going house to house knocking on doors, and the fist cop to knock on the right door would probably be met with bullets, shrapnel, or both.

It's not unlike the old WWII method for finding an enemy sniper. You sent one guy out and, when he got killed, you found your sniper.

So, yes, I would imagine the cops were a little worried. I know I damn sure would have been.

Lesson #2 was a given. Never let a good tragedy go to waste. One company is even pulling pressure cookers off their shelves. I'm not kidding.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Well, as has been said, wait until they are dealing with 10,000 armed, prepared, determined and knowledgeable who have had enough of their JBT bullshit.

I'm assuming that 10,000 can be found in Boston. Perhaps not but the numbers will be skewed to the Marxist's severe disadvantage in other places.


It appears though that some here will fail to turn out for the festivities as they will be told to stay in their homes as Martial Law is declared. They must comply, of course. Obedience is required.



:p

Lesson for the Perp:
If you ae going to hide in a boat in a backyard fill it with water so you won't show up on FLIR.

In spite of the psychophant applause and yeah for the good guys and down with bad guys propaganda.....this Black Op false flag was a failure.....the op was exposed and it woke up many more people.......by the way.....a rumor going around from some law dogs who won't be going the the MSM to give a stsmt says that the MIT Officer may have been hit by friendly fire.....