Lessons from Boston

Editorial

The terror attack on the Boston Marathon was a rare horror of its type in North America. But it, and the foiled plot with apparent links to al-Qaeda against a Canadian train uncovered this week, suggests such atrocities may become less rare.

We still do not know the motivation for the explosions in a crowded public space, which killed three and critically injured scores more. And, in a sense, it shouldn’t matter. If there were a political motivation, it would not bring back the dead nor diminish the challenges faced by the dozens of people who have lost limbs or mobility. Indeed, if a political motivation is uncovered, there will be those who will find a way to blame the victims – if not the individual victims, then the collective victims, in the form of the United States. A lack of known motivation did not deter some Palestinians from celebrating raucously, just as they did on Sept. 11, 2001. Anything that hurts America brings joy to certain segments of the world.

For Israelis and those who empathize with Israel’s decades-long struggle against terrorism, the Boston bombing had particular resonance. Such tragedies – including the use of shrapnel to maximize maiming – were common occurrences before Israel erected the security barrier. And that tragic experience proved beneficial half a world away, when victims of the Boston attack were cared for by a doctor with a background in dealing with just these sorts of injuries.

Dr. Kevin (Ilan) Tabb, head of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, which treated many of the victims, as well as the alleged perpetrator, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is Israeli. Tabb told Ynet that the many leg injuries and amputations that resulted from the blasts were similar to injuries he was too familiar with back home.

“In Israel, we are used to this and here they are not,” Tabb said. “It was very similar to what I was used to in Israel in that we had to admit many injured people in a short period of time.”

Another eerie reality with echoes from the Middle East is the proximity of the victims to their alleged attacker.

“The fact that we are treating both the victims and the suspected terrorist also reminds me of similar situations in Israel,” Tabb said. “In Israel, we had an injured soldier and a terrorist lying on adjacent beds. When an injured person is admitted to the ER, the doctor or nurse treats him without asking questions.”

There is a time and a place for addressing other parallels. It was untimely for Justin Trudeau, the newly named head of the Liberal party of Canada, to speculate on “root causes” when the blasts were still ringing in the ears of victims. The terse reaction to Trudeau’s comments was not, as some claim, an effort to silence any discussion of such extenuating circumstances. Timing was the issue. National Post cartoonist Gary Clement hit the nail on the head, as he often does, with a front-page sketch of Trudeau asking a couple grieving over an open casket: “Can we talk about root causes now, or have I come at a bad time?”

There will be time to talk about what led the brothers Tsarnaev to allegedly perpetrate the act. The priority in the immediate aftermath of such a thing is to condemn it vigorously and comfort the victims.

In the longer-range impact on public policy, we have little indication yet of what, if any, changes we might see in terms of domestic security. While many people have made references to 9/11 in the aftermath of the Boston attack, the sheer numbers of victims and the complexity of hijacking multiple aircraft make the events decidedly different in scale and impact. Yet the attacks on New York and Washington led to the most dramatic change in airline security procedures in the history of flight. In retrospect, a significant strain of U.S. public opinion at the time seemed to be prepared to trade their individual freedoms in exchange for the hope of personal security. Americans continue to debate these issues today, including the existence of an American prison in Cuba, “rendition,” in which suspects can be sent to third countries where they may be tortured, and the right of the president to authorize the killing of individual threats, including American citizens.

It is a point of just pride for Israel that after decades of terror attacks, Israel has managed a tenable equilibrium between individual freedoms and personal (and collective) safety. We do not know yet if the American government will implement new security protocols; as we saw after 9/11, it is possible, with the best of intentions, to overreact.

It is also possible to underreact. It is hard to ignore the fact that the Boston attack, which killed three people, took place two days before the U.S. Senate voted down a modest attempt to regulate the sale of guns, which kill three people every hour of every day of the year in America.

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