It’s not often that patriotic Americans can find common ground with Russia’s Vladimir Putin but in the case of the Boston bombings, we seem to have an exception. During an appearance on Russia Today, Putin blasted western media outlets that referred to terrorists who attacked his country’s civilians as ‘insurgents’.
No one understands Chechen terrorists better than the Russians. The poster child for Chechen terrorism is a guy named Shamil Basayev, a Muslim whose thugs took a hospital hostage in 1995, raided a Moscow theater in 2002, and committed the Beslan school massacre in 2004. Fortunately for civilized societies, Basayev met his end in 2006.
Though Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is considered an adversary of the West, he reportedly called Basayev’s death, “deserved retribution.” It was on this that Russia and the United States could agree. – The Case FOR Islamophobia, p. 358
According to the Boston Globe, Russia contacted U.S. authorities multiple times about the elder Tsarnaev, who had traveled to Russia:
Russian authorities contacted the US government with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev not once but “multiple’’ times, including an alert it sent after he was first investigated by FBI agents in Boston, raising new questions about whether the FBI should have paid more attention to the suspected Boston Marathon bomber, US senators briefed on the investigation said Tuesday.
The FBI has previously said it interviewed Tsarnaev in early 2011 after it was initially contacted by the Russians. In their review, completed in summer 2011, the bureau found no evidence that Tsarnaev was a threat. “The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from” Russia, the agency said last week.
The FBI found that Tsarnaev wasn’t a threat. Ultimately, he was. The Russians were right and the U.S. was wrong about Tamerlan. Why?
Perhaps it is because Russia is less concerned with the civil rights of Islamists who want to rule over them. In the U.S., concerns about the latter are more pronounced. The result is what happened in Boston.
That leads to this case in point, via Reuters (The Post):
Russian law enforcement officers detained 140 people at a Muslim prayer room in Moscow on Friday as part of a search for Islamist militants, Russian news agencies quoted Federal Security Service (FSB) officials as saying.
FSB and Federal Migration Service officers took the detainees, including more than 30 foreigners, to police stations near the site in southern Moscow, state-run RIA cited the FSB’s Moscow branch as saying.
There was no indication of any link to the April 15 attack at the Boston Marathon, in which U.S. authorities believe two ethnic Chechen brothers with roots in Russia’s North Caucasus set off bombs that killed three people and wounded 264.
President Vladimir Putin said in a television appearance on Thursday that the Boston bombings justified his tough line against militants in the North Caucasus and that Russia and the United States must step up cooperation against militants.
Something to ponder…
In WWII, the U.S. allied with the Russians against the Nazis, who allied with the Muslims. Unfortunately, Obama seems more interested in aiding the Muslims today.