Memorials scheduled across the city marked the third anniversary of the deadly 2013 marathon bombings in Boston, as some fear the lessons of that attack have been lost on the Obama administration.
Years after the attack, which killed four people and injured hundreds, the White House refuses to acknowledge the true nature of the threat: radical Islamic extremism, according to Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart News contributor and Chair of Military Theory at Marine Corps University.
Dr. Gorka served as an expert for the Department of Justice (DOJ) during the Boston bombing trial.
“The Obama administration, for ideological reasons, is censoring what is allowed to be said about groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS [Islamic State],” Dr. Gorka told Breitbart News. “It’s still a practice inside the training of federal agents to make it prohibitive to discuss religion or to even use the word jihad, and that makes it almost impossible to provide the adequate preparation and training for the most important part of our national response.”
“The federal government is still being driven by the White House narrative that terrorism is the result of unemployment, poverty, and lack of education. That is completely misdiagnosing the nature of the threat,” he added. “It makes it very, very difficult for people who have to do the work of protecting the nation to understand the threat and being able to analyze it accurately.”
Dr. Gorka noted that although the 2013 Boston bombing was horrific, it is not an isolated jihad-related incident in the United States.
The Threat Knowledge Group (TKG), a defense think-tank chaired by Gorka, shows that since ISIS declared the establishment of a so-called “global caliphate” in June 2014, America has killed or arrested 98 ISIS-linked individuals in the United States.
“We are intercepting three times as many ISIS recruits in America than we are intercepting al-Qaeda recruits,” noted Dr. Gorka. “So, ISIS is really being incredibly successful in recruiting three times as many terrorists.”
Citing the think-tank, he went on to point out that nearly half of U.S. recruits are what the FBI refers to as travelers: “Americans who decided to leave the U.S. and fight the jihad on behalf of ISIS in the Middle East.”
Meanwhile, about one in four are considered management level terrorists, such as recruiters.
“The real disturbing statistic is that a full 30 percent of everybody we are intercepting have decided already that they’re not going to leave America, they’re not going to the Middle East, they’ve decided that they want to kill infidels on U.S. soil,” Gorka told Breitbart News.
Mayor Marty Walsh has declared One Boston Day an annual event. This year, the day began with a wreath laying ceremony near the marathon finish line on Boylston Street.
During the April 2013 bombings, 29-year-old Krystle Campbell, 8-year-old Martin Richard and 23-year-old Lingzi Lu were killed. MIT Police Officer Sean Collier was killed in the chase for the bombers, identified as Chechen refugee brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
The brothers reportedly became radicalized at the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), an extremist mosque founded by MIT students near campus.
In June, Dzhokhar was sentenced to death. Tamerlan was killed in a gunfight with police in the days following the attack.
Mayor Walsh, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, and his wife, Lauren, participated in a brief and quiet memorial on Friday morning.
They “bowed their heads in silence after helping the father of one of the three who died, 29-year-old Krystle Campbell, place a white flower wreath,” reports the Associated Press (AP). “Mayor Marty Walsh placed a second wreath with the families of the other slain victims, 8-year-old Martin Richard and 23-year-old Lingzi Lu.”
“No one spoke,” adds AP. “A bagpipe played softly before the occasion, which was observed by nearly 100 people including survivors, their families and supporters.”
A moment of silence was scheduled at 2:49 p.m. to the tune of ringing church bells across Boston to mark the exact time the first bomb went off.
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