The Boston bombers and the cycle of vengeancce

The bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013 was a heinous crime. Three people died, hundreds were injured, and a policeman was killed in a shootout with the perpetrators. One of the two brothers responsible for the attack died from the shootout. The other, 21-year old immigrant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has been convicted of all charges against him and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Why did they do it? In Tsarnaez's own words, “The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that … we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all. ... Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.” The brothers came from a family riddled with mental illness and dysfunction so the motivation was likely, as it usually is, complex, involving more than what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev says or even understands.

Nonetheless, the victims he refers to are not imaginary. According to the Nobel Prize-winning group Physicians for Social Responsibility, the U.S-led military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have caused, directly and indirectly, the deaths of at least 1.3 million civilians. The moral grievance over these deaths, and those elsewhere in the Muslim world at the hands of Western powers, are felt by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

So the Tsarnaevs decided on an eye for an eye, a motive not lacking in the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And now the Americans will return the same Old Testament vengeance on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Thus the cycle of vengeance continues.

Pondering this young man's killing for what was in his mind a noble cause, one can't help but think of his fellow young Americans in the U.S. military killing for what they saw as a noble cause in Iraq. Both he and they were victims of corrupt leadership, his religious, theirs political.

Tsarnaev's crime was barbaric. The Americans now intend to inflict their own barbaric revenge. Even if they chose to imprison him for life rather than kill him, it would hardly be less primitive. He would be confined at a super maximum prison where he would spend most of his time in solitary confinement, his communications with the outside world severely restricted, and his only exercise brief periods outside in a small cage. The brutality the U.S. has inflicted on the Middle East redounded upon itself in Boston and now claims Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.