Why the Media and Power Establishment Prevented the Public from Understanding the Tsarnaev Bomber Brothers' Motives

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.

"Proud to be from Chechnya, I miss my homeland. #chechnyanpower" — Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

"This family [Tsarnaevs] was trying to settle in a number of places but could not properly assimilate anywhere. At the same time, they could always refer to Chechnya, which is seen as a land of noble knights and as a fairy-tale island by many Chechens who have never lived there."  — Maierbek Vatchagayev, president, Association of Caucasian Studies

As soon as the Boston Marathon bombers were identified as two brothers from Chechnya who had been granted political asylum in the US a decade earlier, experts from both the left and the right furiously assured us that the bombings and shootings that left five dead and some 270 wounded had nothing to do with Chechnya or the brothers’ Chechen identity and experience.

On the right, there’s been an effort to hitch the blame all on their two favorite villains: Islam, and Vladimir Putin. The right is more responsible than anyone for coddling and protecting Chechen terrorists and separatists — Washington neocons and their right-wing allies have been assuring us for over a decade that Chechen terrorism isn’t really terrorism, since Chechens only kill Russians. It makes no logical sense, but that hasn’t stopped the neocon/right-wing lobby from arguing all this time that Chechens have some kind of Western-gag-reflex preventing their violence from blowing back this way.

On the left and libertarian side, stories of the Boston Marathon bombings were stripped of just about every relevant and interesting detail. It was all whittled down to a canned cautionary tale on the evils of the US police state. In the left’s defense, at least they’ve been motivated by recent history — previous terror attacks have led to ethnic and religious profiling targeting Muslims. That’s understandable, but it’s not journalism. Willful ignorance in the name of virtue does not tend to illuminate anything.

Meanwhile, US counterterrorism officials played around with their clunky definitions trying to decide if one or both brothers were "self-radicalized" or "never radicalized" or "radicalized on the Internet" or "radicalized in Dagestan."

With any serious attempt to understand the Tsarnaev brothers, the inadequacy of such facile definitions becomes clear. What made them kill and maim so many Americans when America was the only country that did a lot to improve their lives? And how could it be possible to deny the importance of key aspects of their lives — their personal experiences as Chechens in Russia, their Chechen identity, their rather banal struggles and family infighting as immigrants in the USA.

Of all the myths about Tsarnaevs that "experts" in the media have pushed, the stupidest and most offensive falsehood is the claim that that Chechnya — its violence, wars and savagery — played no role in shaping Tamerlan and his younger brother, Dzhokhar. Tamerlan’s fourth-grade teacher told journalists who bothered asking — German journalists from Focus magazine — that she recalled how traumatized young Tamerlan was from living in Chechnya up through Boris Yeltsin’s invasion and the shelling of the Tsarnaev’s village in 1995. This teacher described Tamerlan as a "refugee from Chechnya, from the war and terrorism."

And yet, we were assured, Chechnya had nothing to do with shaping the Tsarnaev brothers’ minds or their actions.

Initially, the old right-wing Cold War outfit, the Jamestown Foundation, led the PR campaign to steer attention away from Chechnya — and Jamestown’s "experts" were front and center, cited in just about every major media outlet in the days after the Tsarnaev brothers’ identities were revealed. Unlike other right-wing interests, Jamestown and its allies in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (both Jamestown and  RFE/RL were founded by the  CIA during the Cold War) downplayed both the Chechnya angle and the extent to which jihadi terrorism dominates the Chechen separatist movement.