Five Thoughts About Boston

By Jonathan Freedland, Guardian UK

20 April 13

The last 24 hours have felt like an extended episode of Homeland. Amid all the uncertainty, what are we to make of it?

obody knows anything. William Goldman's timeless verdict on Hollywood also applies, it seems, to the handful of spectacular real-life events that resemble Hollywood - including the manhunt for the suspected Boston bombers, which played out on the 24-hour news networks on Friday like an extended episode of Homeland or 24.

There was a time when the scrambling uncertainty over information, grasping hold of an apparent fact only to see it slip through your fingers, was a process kept safely out of public view, behind the closed doors of police stations and newsrooms. Now a watching world shares in the confusion. Everyone with access to a TV, computer or mobile phone could observe - and indeed add to - the mountain of quasi-information as it piled up: a rumoured raid or sighting here, an apparent revelation about the men's origins or ideological leanings there. As I write, the picture is still hazy. But there are five early observations which seem likely to stand.

1. The boundary between foreign and domestic terrorism has been blurred. The question that nagged in the anxious interlude between the blasts on Monday and the publication of the suspects' photos, even if many were wary of putting it too baldly, was a variant on one of these: Who were these men who could do such a thing? Were they from America or abroad? Were they of us or outside us?

   The US, and especially its media, learned a hard lesson after the Oklahoma City bombing - which struck exactly 18 years ago to the day on Friday - when so many rushed to assume that only foreign, presumed to be Muslim, terrorists would inflict such pain on US civilians. The shock at discovering that the bomber was in fact a white supremacist and veteran of the first Gulf war, Timothy McVeigh, went very deep.

   After that, Americans understood that there could be homegrown terror - of the McVeigh variety, fuelled by paranoid loathing of the federal government - and the more conventional, international variety, of which 9/11 will forever be the prime example.

   But if the Tsarnaev brothers were behind the Boston marathon attack, then the line dividing those two categories is unnervingly fuzzy. For they were not born in the US like McVeigh, but nor were they outsiders like the 19 hijackers of 9/11. They were, instead, newcomers to the US, said to have arrived as children. If Monday's bomb was theirs, does that make the three Bostonians it killed victims of foreign or domestic terror?

   The truth is, in today's intensely globalised world, we can no longer think of anywhere as remote. Because far away is right here.

2. These events dent a key American ideal. When four British-born men bombed the London underground (and a bus) on July 7, 2005, it prompted much soul-searching in this country. How could those who had been born and raised here feel so little kinship with their fellow Britons that they would set out to murder scores of them at random? Some, me included, suggested that perhaps we needed to devote more energy into nurturing the ties that bind our diverse nation together - that while multiculturalism had rightly urged Britain's different communities to cherish their heritage and indeed their difference, we needed to put equal energy into forging the connections between us all. The US seemed a good model to learn from, the place that had invented hyphenated identity - Irish-American, Italian-American and the like - but which placed equal emphasis on both sides of that hyphen.

   The melting pot and the American dream are both cliches, but the notion that an immigrant of talent and energy can become fully American, integrating successfully and even rising to the very top, is central to the way the country sees itself. In 2005, I spoke to one Muslim-American leader who saw no reason why his community should ever feel alienated from the rest of their society.

   The Tsarnaev brothers challenge that core part of America's defining story. They looked to be making the classic immigrant journey, the younger brother by all accounts a popular, accomplished young man - once a star on his high school wrestling team, recently enrolled as a medical student. His social media profile had him listing his priorities in quintessentially American terms: "career and money".

   And yet, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a winner in the boxing ring, the traditional escape route for so many immigrants, once said, "I don't have a single American friend; I don't understand them." This will shake Americans, to discover that their country had somehow failed to work its usual seductive magic, transforming onetime outsiders into loyal citizens.

3. This could have a direct political impact, impeding Barack Obama's planned immigration reform. Every rational argument will say that millions of immigrants cannot be judged by the evil deeds of two. Yet politics is not always rational. Obama will need to work hard to resist the argument that the Tsarnaev brothers - if their responsibility for Monday's bombings is confirmed - prove that America needs to dispense the gift of citizenship less freely. Republicans who, chastened by defeat in the 2012 presidential election, were warming to a more open policy may be tempted to close the doors once more.
4. This is the first such attack in the age of Twitter and it has given rise to a new phenomenon: profiling by crowdsourcing. As soon as the names of the two suspects were released, the crowds were unleashed, seeking, if not wisdom, then at least information. Instantly, Twitter buzzed with details of what was purported to be the older suspect's YouTube account - including a playlist dedicated to "terrorism" - and even one brother's Amazon wishlist.

   Perhaps this kind of collective, communal policing is a return to the days of the sheriff and his posse, but it's uncomfortable, especially for the police. At one point they had to urge the media to turn their cameras away and plead with the public not to tweet details of operations they had witnessed or picked up on the police scanner, audible online, lest they alert the wanted man. This is a new situation.

5. The established media are struggling too. On Wednesday, CNN repeatedly reported an arrest when there had been none, while Thursday's New York Post splashed the photos of two innocent men on its front page, implying they were suspects. The media still want to be first, but first can often be wrong.

   As for the larger questions of motive and policy response, it's far too soon for any of that. We still know so little, except this: too many innocent people are dead and will never be coming back.