War on terror is not over

Boaz Bismuth It would have been very convenient for the U.S. administration if Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two brothers believed to be responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, turned out to be members of some radical American fringe group. But that is not the case, so the administration and the American public are facing a dilemma. While there is no evidence at this time to directly link the Tsarnaev brothers to al-Qaida, their fascination with the radical terror group, as well as with other jihadist groups, was easily discovered through their Internet browsing history.  And it was in Boston, one of the friendliest cities in the United States, where U.S. President Barack Obama has received his wake-up call: The war on terror is far from over.  Obama has had to deal with many questions in the wake of the Boston bombing, like how could two young men who were raised in the U.S. and exposed to the American way of life do such a thing? And did they have any outside help? Those are good questions, whose answers may be too hard to handle for someone who has worked so hard to strike the term "Islamic terror" from the American lexicon. The Boston bombing was a lesson to anyone who refused to acknowledge that jihadist ideology can transcend borders and can find its way to the West, and into the minds of bright young men, like 19-year-old Dzhokhar, who was enrolled at the prestigious University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Obama believes in a different, better world. Maybe that was why it took him a whole week to admit that last September's attack in Benghazi, Libya, which killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and four other Americans, was a terror attack. It took him 24 hours to utter the word "terror" after the Boston bombing as well. In his State of the Union address in February, Obama said the U.S. "can say with confidence that America will … achieve our objective of defeating the core of al-Qaida." Obama, whose credits now include taking out Osama bin Laden (a substantial achievement) was convinced that all he had to deal with now were the remnants of this terror group. He even declared that the war on terror was over. America, however, realized that this was far from accurate. Worse: It was exposed to the combination of an internal-external attack, the kind perpetrated by American citizens who were inspired, and perhaps even guided, by external forces. The U.S. suddenly remembered how in 2009 Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Palestinian-American U.S. Army Medical Corps officer, killed 13 of his comrades in Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan's killing spree was inspired by the teachings of American-Yemeni imam and terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. Over the weekend, Boston celebrated the arrest of Dzhokhar, 19, and the death of his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan. There was no doubt that the world's No. 1 power would track down the bombers; but the fact that the FBI questioned Tamerlan in 2011 over his alleged extremist ties and had to let him go because it could not find any incriminating evidence is definitely a cause for concern. Right after the marathon bombing, it was clear that the two devices, which were made up of explosives encased in pressure cookers containing ball bearings and nails, were reminiscent of Islamic terror. There were also reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin offered the U.S. Russia's help in the investigation. All that was missing was Chechnya -- not so much because it has been waging war against Mother Russia since the 19th century, but because it has become a hotbed for radical Islam. That is the reality, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.