In the immediate aftermath of the Boston bombing, ugly evidence emerged of how ethnic stereotyping tears apart civilisational fabric. Misdirected racist vitriol saw Indian- American Sunil Tripathi falsely named as a suspect by hordes of Reddit and Twitter users. One can only imagine the wretched situation of the Tripathi family as one of their own faced a social media lynching, only to be told a week later that a body found in Rhode Island’s Providence Harbour was Sunil’s. Then the Federal Bureau of Investigation aided the steady, trickling flow of background details on the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan (26, killed in a gunfight with police) and Dzhokhar (19, in custody but hospitalised with severe injuries), suspects in the bombing. Within days, the media unearthed the Tsarnaev link with Chechnya, Dagestan and Kyrgyzstan and a cascade of public commentary proclaimed the Islamist connection established. President Barack Obama kept the rhetoric moving along smoothly when he tacitly approved labelling what happened in Boston an “act ... of terror.” After the Boston Marathon bombers struck on April 15, killing four in their wake and injuring 264, the initial caution about ethnoreligious stereotyping of “Islamic extremists” appears to have given way to a freewheeling discourse that seeks to firmly tie Muslims to global terror plots. Before this rather crude logic acquires a national echo and, similar to the post-9/11 scenario, fuels hate crimes against ethnic minorities such as Muslims and Sikhs, it is important to give context to America’s cynical application of the notion of “terrorism.”

Historic Irony

But was it really? There are two problems with America’s eagerness to call the admittedly despicable attack on civilians “terrorism.” The first is replete with historic irony. What happened on 9/11 on the U.S.’ eastern seaboard is often seen as the culmination of Washington’s engagement in Afghanistan during the 1980s, particularly the CIA’s shadowy Operation Cyclone, through which hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped into the coffers of Afghan fighters battling the forces of Mohammad Najibullah. While some insist the CIA’s funding did not cross the red lines between the Afghan Mujahideen and foreign or Arab fighters, questions were raised about whether the same weapons and training that flooded Afghanistan during that era came back to haunt the U.S. in the form of an invigorated al Qaeda and Taliban in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Hypocrisy in Chechnya

Despite the grisly episodes of the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis, the 2004 Beslan school siege and several other “terror” attacks associated with Chechen separatists, the U.S., led by the neocon- taffed American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), chose to turn a blind eye to events in the region. Back in 2004, John Laughland of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group explained that ACPC members represented “the backbone of the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” and included Richard Perle, a former Pentagon advisor, and James Woolsey, former CIA director who backed George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The influential group heavily promoted the idea that “the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin’s Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic.”

The ACPC then upped the pressure against the Putin regime even more in August 2004, when it “welcomed the award of political asylum in the U.S., and a U.S.- government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, Foreign Minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist.”

Was Washington happy to countenance violent groups so long as rival Russia and its intractable President Putin faced the heat? In insisting Moscow achieve a political, rather than military, solution wasn’t the U.S. administration actually calling on Mr. Putin to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the U.S. “resolutely rejects” elsewhere?