TerrorismIs there a homegrown terrorism trend in Boston?
Citing several incidents involving Boston-based terrorists, some ask whether homegrown terrorism might be a trend specific to Boston. “Clearly, there have been a number of incidents here, and some of that is because Boston is really an international city,” said former Boston Police Department commissioner Ed Davis. “It seems to be more than a coincidence,” says one scholar. “But there’s no good answer.”
Citing several incidents involving Boston-based terrorists, theBoston Globe has asks in a new editorial whether homegrown terrorism might be a trend specific to Boston.
Shelley Murphy and Peter Schworm write for the paper that outside of the infamous Tsarnaev brothers who set off explosives at the 2013 Boston Marathon, there have been other cases in the region in the past few years, including that of Tarek Mehanna, who translated documents for Al Qaeda from his Sudbury home; Rezwan Ferdaus, who planned to create drone bombs in Ashland; and most recently, a Roslindale man who was tracked by an antiterrorism task force and killed in an altercation last week.
“Clearly, there have been a number of incidents here, and some of that is because Boston is really an international city,” said former Boston Police Department commissioner Ed Davis, who is an international security consultant and a consultant to the Globe. “I don’t want to downplay the fact there have been repeated incidents. I think we have to look closely at it at this point.”
Despite still ranking behind New York City in terms of incidents of violent extremism, the numbers in Boston are high, and none of the cases can be traced to a similar network, according to J. M Berger, the coauthor of ISIS: The State of Terror and the author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam.
“There was a “robust radical presence in the Boston area in the 1990s, when members of the Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York — which was linked to the 1993 truck-bombing attack at the World Trade Center — moved to Massachusetts and operated an organization that sent fighters and supplies to Bosnia,” he said. “Most of that group’s members were sent to prison or deported.”
Even if there was once a localized radical social network, however, Berger added that the latest cases forego this pattern.
“One of the few indicators of whether someone will become a violent extremist is with whom they associate, whether over the Internet or in person,” Berger said. “If you’re friends with a violent extremist, you are likely to be one.”
James Forest, the director of security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Terrorism and Security Studies, argued that the cases could not even be linked in a localized manner, so common are much of the characteristics across the country.
“We’ve seen similar kinds of plots in many cities,” he said. “These guys could just have easily been in Chicago, Denver, or Houston.” “The ideology [is what] motivates these kind of attacks, there are no geographical boundaries.”
Forest cited other recent cases in Chicago and Ohio as evidence of a broader trend outside of Boston.
“It seems to be more than a coincidence,” added Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, regarding whether Boston is seeing a great share of terrorism incidents. “But there’s no good answer.”
