Capping off a week of misinformation, confusion, contradiction, and error from the media and law enforcement, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino insisted Sunday that the Boston Marathon jihad bombers acted alone, even as it was becoming increasingly obvious that they did not. The UK’s Mirror reported on the same day that “the FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist ‘sleeper cell’ linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers.” And so the jihad in Boston widens to proportions that are as yet impossible to calculate – as are the potential casualty rates.

The Mirror added: “Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack” and quoted an unnamed source saying: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google. They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”

And so, according to the Mirror, “more than 1,000 FBI operatives” were working to find the members of this sleeper cell. It was unclear whether or not that would be enough, given the fact that in 2011 the Obama Administration purged training materials of all truthful material about Islamic jihad terrorism. So these 1,000 “FBI operatives” are fumbling along in the dark, pretending that there is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist while hunting for Islamic terrorists.

This willful ignorance is, of course, being aided and abetted by the mainstream media, which continues to shrug its shoulders in bewilderment and claim that the motives of the Boston Marathon bombers are a mystery. In a Saturday article entitled “Motive still unclear after bombing suspect’s arrest,” the Associated Press noted that investigators were “establish[ing] the motive for the deadly attack and the scope of the plot.” The absurdity of 1,000 FBI agents hunting for a jihadi sleeper cell while investigators searched for a motive for the attack was compounded by the fact that on the same day that AP made this bizarre claim, the Los Angeles Times reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “identified by a foreign government as a ‘follower of radical Islam and a strong believer’ whose personality had changed drastically in just a year, according to the FBI.”

In October 2011, Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that “training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.” And so the FBI in 2013, in passing along a description of one of the Boston jihadis as a “follower of radical Islam,” was saying he was an adherent of a belief system that the Feds were officially committed to denying even existed.

The absurdities multiply, as they always do in the mainstream media and among law enforcement officials at a time like this (most notoriously in the Obama Administration’s classification of the Fort Hood jihad massacre of thirteen Americans as “workplace violence”). Lisa Wangsness in the Boston Globe granted that “Islam might have had secondary role in Boston attacks,” but added that “scholars cautioned Friday against concluding that the Tsarnaevs’ motives were purely religious. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a firefight with police early Friday morning, appeared to sympathize with Islamic extremists agitating for Chechen independence from Russia.”

Wangsness did not bother to explain why “Islamic extremists agitating for Chechen independence from Russia” would think a strike in Boston, Massachusetts would aid the cause of the independence of Chechnya. Nor did she explore the possibility that Islamic jihadis agitating for a global caliphate might think a strike on Boston would be a capital idea, for that would reveal the jihadi brothers’ motives to be “purely religious” after all. She made it clear that anyone who thought that must be wickedly trying to victimize innocent Muslims, quoting Imam Suhaib Webb of the Islamic Society of Boston: “This will open the door to the Islamophobic industry, an industry of ill-educated bigots, to attack Muslim communities.”

The Globe article doesn’t mention that the Tsarnaev brothers actually attended Muslim prayers at the Islamic Society of Boston. Nor does it acknowledge the possibility that anyone might want to explore how jihadis use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and supremacism not in order to “attack Muslim communities,” but to try to formulate effective strategies for keeping members of those Muslim communities from attacking us.

And in the Chicago Tribune, Manya A. Brachear took Wangsness’ Muslim victimhood posturing one step farther in an article entitled “Muslims guard against backlash.” She wrote: “The Council on American Islamic Relations again offered sympathy to victims of the Boston Marathon bombing on Friday, but added a plea for Americans not to generalize and conclude that Muslim teachings influenced the suspect in any way.” She quoted CAIR’s Ahmed Rehab: “Our focus is primarily on the victims. We don’t want to be drawn into defending ourselves.” But that was what the whole article was about. Completely forgetting the victims of the Boston jihad attacks, the article went on: “Citing acts of violence in Boston and New York, Rehab blamed Islamophobic forces for inciting hate crimes. He said that phenomenon poses a bigger threat than ‘innocently ignorant individuals.’” And again, there was no consideration of the possibility that one might want to investigate the role of Islam in jihad attacks in order to prevent hate crimes, not provoke them.

Brachear also doesn’t mention (of course) that Ahmed Rehab is an operative of a Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood group that has had several of its officials convicted of jihad terror activity. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. CAIR has opposed every anti-terror measure that has ever been proposed or implemented.

This always happens: every time there is a jihad terror attack or foiled plot, the mainstream media fills up with stories about Muslims worrying about a “backlash.” The “backlash” itself never materializes. In reality, the stream of stories about fears of “backlash” are designed to deflect attention away from the jihad attack and onto Muslims as victims, who as victims ought to be exempt from scrutiny and accountability (even though no U.S. mosque or Islamic school has any program designed to teach against the al-Qaeda version of Islam that they ostensibly reject).

As David J. Rusin noted in National Review last January, “a detailed analysis of FBI statistics covering ten full calendar years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks reveals that, on a per capita basis, American Muslims, contrary to spin, have been subjected to hate crimes less often than other prominent minorities. From 2002 to 2011, Muslims are estimated to have suffered hate crimes at a frequency of 6.0 incidents per 100,000 per year – 10 percent lower than blacks (6.7), 48 percent lower than homosexuals and bisexuals (11.5), and 59 percent lower than Jews (14.8). Americans should keep these numbers in mind whenever Islamists attempt to silence critics by invoking Muslim victimhood.”

No victimization of even one innocent person is ever acceptable. These “backlash” stories, however, are just tools in the hands of Islamic supremacists, which they use once again to evade any responsibility to clean up their communities and stop the spread of the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism.

And yet there is an Islamic jihad sleeper cell apparently involved in the jihad attack at the Boston Marathon. That shows the cost of this politically correct obfuscation and victimhood posturing.

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After the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Obama asked, “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence”

Despite the scholarships and the positive press, the money and the good times that came their way, the Tsarnaevs were never truly part of our communities or our country. As the words of a Jihadist song in Dzhokhar’s playlist go, “Be in this temporary world a stranger/Infidels rule the earth/for the faithful life is torture.”

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were strangers. Tamerlan had an American wife and Dzhokhar had plenty of American friends but they chose to treat a city and a nation that had taken them in as targets in a terrorist war. As infidels who deserved nothing more than to be lied to and killed.

The Tsarnaevs weren’t insane. Nor were they nihilists looking to go out with a bang just for the kicks. Their social media accounts reveal the world of two men who had strong beliefs and commitments. These beliefs and commitments however were not to this country. They were to the Islamic Ummah.

Two months before his killing spree, Tamerlan reproved another Muslim for not believing. Unlike him, Tamerlan believed. What he believed in was not the mere nationalism of a land that he had never lived in. If Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had only wanted Chechen independence, they could have joined the fight there. But if the thought ever crossed their minds, they were reoriented in another direction.

To Americans, the Chechen Jihadists, the Syrian rebels, the Palestinian terrorists, the Afghan Taliban and the Mali Turaeg fighters all represent national struggles. To Muslims, they are all local manifestations of a global struggle between Islam and the world. For the Tsarnaevs, Chechnya wasn’t any different than Afghanistan, Nigeria, Thailand, America or any other theater of battle in a world war. Instead of trying to fight a war in a country he had never seen, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dispatched or dispatched himself to fight a battle in the country that he knew best.

In Obama’s speech, the willingness of the Tsarnaev brothers to kill the people of the country they had grown up in is a paradox. But it isn’t a paradox; it’s the point.

Communists in America undermined the country not just because they saw it as the greatest villain, but because Communists in every nation were committed to undermining it in order to remake it. Each Communist movement was fighting a local front in a transnational struggle. For Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev their local front was not Chechnya; it was Boston.

Chechnya to the Tsarnaevs represented the Islamic transnationalism of the Jihadist that transcended nations. Their Chechen nationalism, like Hamas’ Palestinian nationalism and the Syrian nationalism of the rebel brigades linked to the Muslim Brotherhood derived from a common Islamic identity. It could have no meaning without Islam.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev carried out the marathon massacre not because they were on the outside, but because they were on the inside. Islamic terrorism was their way of expressing their American identity. When they detonated bombs at the Boston Marathon, they weren’t doing it as Chechen Muslims, but as American Muslims.

Like Anwar al-Awlaki and Nidal Hasan, they wanted an American identity that would be based on Islam in the same way that Chechen identity was based on Islam. They wanted it because they believed it to be the only possible way of making America over into a country that would reflect their own values.

There is a reason why second and third generation Muslims are more likely to turn terrorist than their immigrant parents. It is because they have become American, British, Canadian and Australian part of the way. They have gone deep enough to begin making a claim on the country. The Western Islamist seeks to align his internal Islamic identity and his external national identity by unifying them through Islamization.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were not fighting for Chechnya at the Boston Marathon. They were fighting against the American infidels who were barring the way to an Islamic America. They were fighting to make America like Chechnya. Islam is not just a religion. It is a political system. You cannot expect a devout Muslim to live as an American, the same way that you could not expect a Communist, Nazi or any other consuming political identity to just keep it private or local. To think that way is to truly misunderstand Islam.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did not become radicalized. They became religious. They embraced a transnational ideology which applied not only to them, their mosque or their community, but to the entire world. Eventually the discontinuity between their beliefs and the life of the city around them became too great to be tolerated. And so the Tsarnaevs, inspired in no small part by the Islamist culture that they found on the internet and perhaps at their own radical mosque, set out to resolve the conflict through terrible violence.

The two brothers were showered with educational and financial advantages. The United States took them in as refugees. The City of Cambridge awarded Dzhokhar a $2,500 scholarship. Tamerlan aspired to be a boxer and found a woman who loved him enough to take his religion. They lived the good life, but it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough.

The liberals who refuse to see what the Tsarnaev brothers stood for passionately believe in the things that they think it will take to make the world a better place. The Tsarnaevs believed that only one thing was necessary; Islam.

Islam was born out of war and terror. It spread through the sword and the slave. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were not the disciples of some imaginary religion of peace, but a religion of war. What they did was horrifying, but not surprising. They were taking part in a world war that had begun over a thousand years ago.

They did not expect to strike the finishing blow; just another blow to bring America closer to the form of submission known as Islam. Like other Muslim terrorists operating in the countless theaters of the world war, from Asia to Africa to the Middle East to Australia and America, they sought to shock and horrify, to break our will to resist and force us to submit.

“He it is who has sent His Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth to make it victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist.” Koran 61:9

In Boston the infidels resisted the messengers of Mohammed and Allah. They patched up the wounded and saved as many as they could. They hunted down the messengers and shot them. But more will come. They will speak the language of our popular culture and their classmates will remember them as nice young men. No one will understand what caused such nice young men to do it except other nice young men like them who feel the tension between Islam and America inside them waiting to break.

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Watching the news about the Boston bombing and the Muslim fanatics who perpetrated the deed, I cannot help reflect on all the nasty attacks that liberals and progressives and Muslim activists have conducted against conservatives who have attempted to warn Americans that their enemies are religious fanatics driven by an apocalyptic hatred of us because we are Jews, Christians, atheists, democrats – in a word, infidels.

It has been said by Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and other Democrats that George Bush created the terrorists by attempting to enforce a UN Security council resolution and take down one of the monsters of the 20th Century in Iraq.  It has been said by the late Susan Sontag and other progressive intellectuals that the heinous attacks of 9/11 were the result of American policies. The Center for American Progress and university administrators have relentlessly defamed as Islamphobes and bigots those of us who have had the temerity to talk about the Islamic roots of Islamic terror. If only we ignored the Islamic beliefs behind the terrorism and made nice to all Muslims indiscriminately, the terrorists wouldn’t hate us.

Boston has exposed this as the Big Lie and fatuous delusion that it has always been. The Boston killers were treated better in America than all but an elite among Americans born here who love their country. They were given scholarships, they were admitted to the most exclusive prep schools, they lived in a Cambridge environment where critics of Islamic terror were regarded as Islamophobes and they as a minority deserving special consideration and concern. And yet they hated us. They hated America and ordinary Americans like the victims of their mayhem, and enlisted in the army of our mortal enemies. They hated us because they were fanatical believers in the idea that Mohammed had desired them to kill infidels and purify the earth for Allah. This is the face of our enemy and the sooner the delusional liberals among us wake up to this fact, the safer all of us will be.

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Despite the fervent wishes of the progressive media and the buffoonish David Sirota, who hoped the culprit was “a white guy,” the terrorists who bombed the Boston Marathon have turned out to be not white, Tea Party, tax-hating bitter clingers, but Chechen Muslims. Quelle surprise, as the French say. Now we’ll start hearing all the rationalizing interpretations for their act, few of which will state the obvious: they murdered people because Islam gives them the theological sanction to use violence against infidels whose existence threatens the Islamic hegemony sanctioned by Allah.

Of course, for the secular materialists and pundits of the left, whose minds are furnished with tired received wisdom and banal clichés, such as statement is Islamophobic hate speech. Only Christianity and Judaism lead to violence, from the Crusades to Zionism. Islam is the tolerant “religion of peace” that created the Renaissance and treated Jews and Christians kindly. If Muslims act violently–over 20,000 violent attacks since 9/11–then they must have been provoked by Western bad behavior: colonialism, imperialism, greed for oil, support for Israel, disrespect of Islam and Mohammed, the War on Terror that has demonized Muslims. Or the terrorists are created by the inequities and costs of global capitalism, which give young Muslim men few educational or economic opportunities, creating frustration and despair that make them turn to a distorting heresy of Islam for relief. Or they are the products of oppressive political regimes that limit their freedom, violate their human rights, and stifle their aspirations.

We’ve heard all these explanations for over a decade now from both the left and the right. What we haven’t seen is very much evidence that they are remotely true. History provides no evidence that America’s alleged foreign policy sins outweigh the demonstrable concrete benefits to Muslims of our actions. America never had colonies in Muslim lands, and indeed after World War II resisted French and British attempts to reassert their authority over their one-time colonies, most obviously in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Since then, the U.S. armed the Afghans and helped them drive out the Soviets, rescued Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from the psychopathic sadist Saddam Hussein, bombed Christian Serbs to rescue Muslim Kosovars and Bosnians, liberated Shiite Iraqis from Hussein, liberated Afghans from the brutal Taliban, poured billions of dollars of aid to terrorist Palestinian regimes, used our jets to help the Muslims in Libya free themselves from the psychotic Gaddafi, and supported in word and coin the jihadist, America-hating, anti-Semitic Muslim Brothers in Egypt so that Muslims can enjoy “freedom and democracy.”

And that’s not all. We have incessantly protested our respect for the wonderful Islamic faith, censored our official communications and training programs to remove any references to jihadism or the Islamic theology that justifies holy war, euphemized jihadist attacks like the Fort Hood murders as “workplace violence,” invited sketchy imams to pray in the White House, filled our schools with curricula praising Islam and its contributions to civilization, scolded and prosecuted writers or cartoonists who exercise their First Amendment right to criticize Islam, abandoned “profiling” as a technique for identifying possible terrorists trying to board a plane or enter the country, hired as advisors to the FBI, the Pentagon, and the CIA Muslim apologists who recycle blatant lies and distortions–we have done all this liberating of Muslims and flattering of them and their faith, and they still don’t like us, and they still want to kill us.

This disconnect between our alleged bad behavior and the motives of the jihadists is starkly obvious in the case of the Boston terrorists. If Chechen Muslims have a beef with anyone, it’s the Russians. When jihadist terrorism became a problem in Chechnya, there were no “hearts and minds” campaigns, no solicitous outreach, no infusions of foreign aid, no apologies for past sins, no careful adherence to the laws of war, the Geneva conventions, or human rights, no courting of imams to provide insights into the wonderfulness of Islam. The Russians employed torture, assassination, group reprisals, and in the end ringed Grozny with artillery and left it in ruins. In the two Chechen wars the Russians killed around 150,000 people. In fact, Russia has been killing Muslims since the 18th century, and occupied Muslims lands in Central Asia for 80 years under the Soviet Union. So tell me, Senator Rand Paul or Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, if our foreign policy misbehavior explains jihadist hatred, how is that two centuries of Russian violence against Muslims is ignored, and all our blood and treasure spent to liberate and help Muslims count for nothing

No more convincing are the other rationalizations for Muslim violence. Lack of education and economic opportunity exist all over the world, but African Christians and animists, or Indian Hindus and Buddhists don’t commit acts of terrorism with anywhere near the same frequency as Muslims. Plenty of people across the globe live under oppressive dictators who routinely violate human rights, and they don’t turn to terrorism against distant strangers in response. Tibetans aren’t donning suicide vests or bombing marathons. Millions and millions of impoverished everywhere don’t kill innocent people in random attacks in countries far from their homes. Every excuse for Muslim violence collapses beneath the weight of such facts. Meanwhile, the one factor all these killers–rich or poor, educated or not, politically oppressed or otherwise–have in common, Islam, is preemptively rejected as the explanation for the violence.

This “willful blindness,” as Andy McCarthy calls, has become dangerous. It reflects the arrogance of secular materialism, which has discounted religion as a mere life-style choice, usually benign–unless you’re talking about gun-toting, racist, misogynist, homophobic evangelical Christians, or racist, land-grabbing Zionist Jews. No, it’s about psychological trauma caused by globalization, or Islamophobia, or insensitive insults to Mohammed, or Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, or anything and everything other than the numerous passages in the Koran, hadiths, and 14 centuries of Islamic jurisprudence and theology, which clearly and consistently set out the doctrine of violent jihad against infidels.

So expect in the coming weeks the same old commentary about foreign-policy blowback, or two-bit psychological analyses of personal trauma, or Israel’s sins and Bush’s wars, or American intolerance and xenophobia, or our need to “reach out” and “engage” and “respect” and “understand” the fanatics who don’t want our outreach, tolerance, or respect, but our deaths. In short, expect more public reasons for the jihadists to believe we are weak and corrupt and thus deserving to die.

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A Facebook user, David Green, helped the investigation with a high-res photograph of the suspect

It started with the false claim that a Saudi man was a suspect (he was actually a victim), something the networks ran with (including the rumour that he had been thrown into a cage) and were then forced to retract. Then there was a second “attack” at the JFK library that turned out to be an unrelated fire. Pundits weighed in uselessly, calling for the deaths of all Muslims in the world on Twitter or else somehow laying responsibility at the feet of the otherwise peaceful and democratic Tea Party (was Sarah Palin anywhere near the scene – we have the right to know). In the words of Michael Moynihan, “Three days in, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of who has been wrong about what.” Indeed, it’s been a screw-up of epic proportions.

But where the mainstream media missed something, social media was there to plug the gaps – accurately or otherwise. It was a Facebook user, David Green, who first posted a helpful high-res photograph of the suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev. Pictures from the siege in Watertown were later captured by ordinary Joes and put up on Youtube, only for the networks to seize and distribute them. Amateur detectives abounded. Images of the suspects released by the FBI were posted on social networking sites, allowing people to post up their own pics of folks who looked a bit like them and so track their movements. Some evil and some good came of it. Poor 17-year-old Sala Barhoum – who was entirely innocent – was fingered by Reddit readers and ended up on the front page of the New York Post as a chief suspect. This morning (UK time) the talk of the offices was that the missing student Sunil Tripathi was one of the killers – and that turned out to be very wrong, too. On the other hand, Reddit proved fastest with coverage and there’s a good reason why so many networks and newspapers decided to report it as a source. Take a look at Reddit right now and you’ll note a mix of interesting journalism on what’s happening in Watertown, amateur detective work, screeds against amateur detective work and messages offering sympathy for the victims. The habit of mainstream media in presuming that social forums operate with one voice are misplaced.

So do not blame Twitter or the blogosphere for anything that the networks happen to get wrong. The bigger culprits are a) the tendency of rolling news to report everything and anything without waiting for all the facts to come in and b) the habit of pundits of feeling that they have to offer a guilty party and a political analysis before the dust has even cleared. Social networks are just doing their unpaid, organic thing of collating random thoughts. The mainstream media is supposed be a little more selective and sober.

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It has now been revealed that the Boston Marathon bombers were two Muslims from southern Russia near Chechnya: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a firefight with Massachusetts police early this morning, and his brother Dzhokhar, who as of this writing is still at large.

As more and more material comes to light about the pair, their motivations become clear. On a Russian-language social media page, Dzhokhar features a drawing of a bomb under the heading “send a gift,” and just above links to sites about Islam. Tamerlan’s YouTube page features two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Mohammed “urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.”

Tamerlan also says, “I’m very religious.” He notes that he does not drink alcohol because Allah forbids it: “God said no alcohol,” and that his Italian girlfriend has converted to Islam. Even his name indicates the world from which he comes: Tamerlan Tsarnaev is apparently named for the Muslim warrior Tamerlane. Andrew Bostom wrote in 2005 that “Osama bin Laden was far from the first jihadist to kill infidels as an expression of religious piety….Osama lacks both Tamerlane’s sophisticated (for his time) military forces and his brilliance as a strategist. But both are or were pious Muslims who paid homage to religious leaders, and both had the goal of making jihad a global force.”

Combine all that with the fact that the bombs were similar to IED’s that jihadis use in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square jihad car bomber, used a similar bomb, and that instructions for making such a bomb have been published in al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, and the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers are abundantly clear. It is increasingly likely also that they were tied in somehow to the international jihad network, as is indicated by how they fought off Boston police early on Friday with military-grade explosives – where did they get those And where did they get the military training that they reportedly have, and displayed in several ways during the fight Friday morning

Yet despite all this, the mainstream media continues to obfuscate the truth. NBC doesn’t see fit to mention any of the brothers’ connections to Islam in their profile of them. CNN warns that “it should not be assumed that either brother was radicalized because of their Chechen origins.” And this, of course, follows days of speculation about how the bombings appeared to be the work of “right-wing extremists,” “Tea Partiers,” and the like. According to Victor Medina in the Examiner, “Esquire Magazine’s Charles P. Pierce attempted to link the bombings to right wing extremists similar to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In another, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen speculated that the type of bomb device could link it to right wing extremist groups.” Salon hoped that the bomber would turn out to be a “white American.”

Will Pierce, Bergen, and all the others who offered similar analyses apologize now They almost certainly will not – and even worse, they will not be held accountable. No matter how often mainstream analysts are wrong, they never get questioned or jettisoned.

But in one sense, they were right: the bombers were indeed white, if not American. That demonstrates once and for all the vacuity of the mainstream media and Islamic supremacist claim that opposing jihad and Islamic supremacism is “racism.” Islam is not a race, and the massacre of innocent civilians is not a race. Opposing jihad is not racism, but the defense of freedom. The Tsarnaev brothers have confirmed that. However, nothing is more certain than that next week, Islamic supremacist and Leftist spokesmen will be featured on NBC and CNN decrying “racism” and an imagined “backlash” against innocent Muslims, which is always a feature of mainstream media coverage after a jihad attack, even though the “backlash” itself never actually materializes.

And there will be no accountability for that nonsense, either. Nowadays, it’s much more of a path to success to be politically correct than to be correct.

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Before acquiring power, Margaret Thatcher was nothing. She was trained as a chemist. Her career in politics was marked by doggedness, but no one, before her accession to office, would have noted her as a distinctive British personality, a woman who for a time could embody the national will. It was power that established her importance, and power that brought into being all of her now-immortal incarnations—diva, mother of the nation, coy flirt, hissing serpent, stern headmistress, eyes of Caligula, mouth of Bardot, screeching harridan, frugal housewife, Boadicea the Warrior Queen, and Iron Lady, all in one.

Whether admired or reviled, Thatcher provokes a question that anyone who has traced her life and her time in office must inevitably ask: Why her It is, in some ways, the most interesting question about her; it is also the least answerable. It would be tempting to say that this is an irony that Thatcher herself would have appreciated, but of all the qualities attributed to her, a sense of irony is least among them.

She didn’t belong to the constellation of English political leaders who, even without power, would have compelled the interest and curiosity of the time in which they lived. Had William Gladstone or Benjamin Disraeli never climbed to the top of the greasy pole, as Disraeli once put it, both men—by the force of their character, their literary abilities, their culture, and their capacity conspicuously to glitter—would have been a part of the historical drama of the nineteenth century. It is not in their company that Margaret Thatcher should be placed. Failing to command the obedience of her cultural superiors, she would have been uninterested in their company, anyway. Like the proverbial hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin’s parable (itself based on Greek myth), she was meant to do one thing: accumulate and exercise political power. It was power that established her importance, not her importance that established her power.

Her character, certainly, had something to do with it, and in office these aspects of it revealed themselves to be the most remarkable: the fixity of her moral landscape, her self-confidence, her self-discipline, her ruthlessness, and the molten lava of energy at the core of her personality. Out of these qualities she fashioned of herself a kind of Kryptonite against all forms of socialism and collectivism, both in Britain and the world. She did so precisely as the war against socialism at home and abroad was ripe for the winning—at least for a time—and in so doing, created the Margaret Thatcher not only of history, but also of myth. Where these qualities came from and why they manifested themselves suddenly in her, of all people, no one knows. It is one of the great mysteries about her and in a larger sense, about greatness itself; there will never be a satisfactory answer.

She had, as well, two other distinct and remarkable gifts, also of inexplicable origin. Almost to a man, or in this case a woman, the historical figures who matter have had the ability to recognize forces accumulating that others either ignore or do not see; and when given power, they have the capacity to master them. Thatcher was among these historical figures. She did not accumulate power for its own sake; she exercised it to pursue certain aims. She perceived accurately that Britain was in decline, and she understood that unless the decline were reversed, it would soon be irreversible. It was a singular judgment, one not widely made. Socialism was advancing in Britain. She halted it, proving at once that it could be done, that a single figure could do it, and that a woman could be that single figure.

None of this was known before.

Claire Berlinski, a City Journal contributing editor, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.

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Freedom lost a friend today in Baroness Margaret Thatcher. Lady Thatcher passed away of a stroke at the age of 87, marking the end of an era that gave us truly fearless leaders. Along with President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, Thatcher stood strong against communism in the 1980s and championed the policies of prosperity and individual liberty to not only Great Britain, but to the world.

From 1979-1990, Thatcher was at the helm of British government and ushered in their economic recovery. By 1976, the Labour Party had driven Britain into, essentially, bankruptcy. The value of British currency was dropping and the government had to take out a loan with the International Monetary Fund.

By May of 1979, garbage collectors were on strike, leading to piles of trash in the streets. The National Mineworkers of UK had such a stranglehold on fuel supplies that the British government had imposed a 3-day work week on commercial users of electricity. In Liverpool, gravediggers and crematorium workers were willing to let human remains go unburied rather than get back to work. Understandably, Britain was ready for a change and elected Thatcher as Prime Minister, the first woman to lead a western democracy.

Through her beliefs in economic freedom, individual liberty, and the connection between the two, Thatcher led Britain out of this economic tailspin and into prosperity. Personal responsibility, hard work, and free-market democracies were just what the country needed. To let these principles shine, she broke the power of the labor unions, forced the left to give up on nationalized industry, and redefined the role of the welfare state. Thatcher understood that „every regulation represents a restriction of liberty, every regulation has a cost,” and wasn’t afraid to fight against them, even amongst members of her own party.

It took time for recovery to come about, but Thatcher refused to bow to the more moderate wing of the Tory party, saying “I am not a consensus politician, I am a conviction politician.”  Standing on these convictions, British businesses boomed and more and more people moved into the middle class.

When Thatcher took office in 1979, the top tax rate was 98% and had a stranglehold on industry. By the time she left in 1990, it had been reduced to 40%. This allowed the wealthiest Britons to invest in the economy, leading to real growth by way of new hires and entrepreneurial endeavors. Real GDP growth increased during this time as well while nationalized industries such as gas, telephone, and airlines were privatized. In short, she proved that conservative principles work.

As she said in a 1988 speech,

“The lesson of the economic history of Europe in the 70’s and 80’s is that central planning and detailed control do not work and that personal endeavour and initiative do…Our aim should not be more and more detailed regulation from the centre: it should be to deregulate and to remove the constraints on trade.”

With undeniable success, even many detractors came to respect her. Labour politician Peter Mandelson said in 2002 that „We are all Thatcherites now.” She was so successful, in fact, that she is the only three-term prime minister of Britain in the 20th century.

Thatcher grew up in an apartment above her father’s grocery store.  She learned the value of hard work and dedication from her humble roots, and with her tenacious spirit went on to save Britain from Socialism.  America and the world over has lost an incredible leader. Let us take this opportunity to remember her leadership and fight on.

„To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”

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