Justice Massachusetts style coughed up another hairball on 15 May; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Muslim Chechen terrorist who, along with his brother, detonated two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. The older brother was killed by police, the younger Tsaranev is now a convict consigned to death row. Dzhokhar’s trial was speedy. His death may come from old age.

Tsaranev saluting American jurisprudence

US Attorney Carmen Ortiz tells us Tsarnaev will “pay with his life.” In fact, the chances that Mr. Tsaranev will be executed, in Boston or anywhere else, are slim to none.  Massachusetts hasn’t used the death penalty in 70 years. A death sentence in America is a legal placebo, a celebrity annionting, and a bone thrown to that segment of the electorate who still believes in capital punishment and the Easter Bunny.

[Homicide statistics provide some reality therapy on the matter.  There are approximately 15,000 homicides in the US per annum. Nearly half of all murders go unsolved each year. Not counting abortions, there were 35 legal executions in 2014. How is justice served for the remaining 14,965 first degree murder victims every year? Ironically, the burdens of murder, legal or not, fall mostly on victims, those least able to defend themselves.

Compassion in America is a study in hypocrisy. The same demographic that opposes the death penalty supports abortions and “death with dignity” (nee euthanasia). Reverence for life is one of those American “choices” where free will is selectively applied. Planned Parenthood alone now accounts for a fourth of 56 million American infant deaths since 1973. “Accidents,” abortions, suicides, overdoses,  assisted suicides, and homicides in combination have become America’s most popular means of crowd control. “Choice” is the thread that binds the means. If facts matter, any criminal execution is just a tedious and rare footnote for those more voluminous death cults so often covered by veils of social euphemism.]

Nonetheless, with ironic consistency, the US Department of Justice and the American Media now compound the “homicide” hypocrisy by making Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the new terror darling, a jail-house martyr.

e cover of Rolling Stone

Indeed,  American media and that Boston jury may have canonized Dzhokhar as a cause celebre for the anti-death penalty American Left -- and at the same time provided another pretty poster boy for the genocidal Muslim Right. As an imprisoned religious role model, Dzhokhar’s best years as a progressive icon and jihad recruiter are still ahead of him. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi should send the Obama Justice Department a case of grape juice and a basket of falafel.

If justice were truly served, Dzhokhar would be dumped into the general prison population at Walpole where the younger Tsarnaev could become a jailhouse tsarina overnight.

Alas, the Boston Bomber can now look forward to three hots, a cot, and indefinite American, if not global, indulgence and celebrity.  If we use the Fort Hood, Texas  massacre and Major (US Army) Nidal Malik Hasan as a precedent, Tsaranev will get the same special treatment: a prayer rug, a Koran, an imam, a beard, halal meals, a dishadashas, and  kufis – all at taxpayer expense. CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and Rolling Stone are certain to insure that every other aspiring jihadi gets a periodic fix of Muslim religious propaganda from Hasan and the Tsarnaev.

Calling Tsarnaev or Hasan “lone wolves,” is itself a transparent attempt to romanticize and separate terrorists from imperial Islam, global jihad, deadly internet propaganda, and the reality of a global war that the West is losing in slow motion.

Major (Doctor) Hasan, before and after

Treating jihadists, who target civilians, as common criminals instead of POWs and/or war criminals is possibly the worst error in institutional judgement since the Boston Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the NY Yankees. With Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on death row, Boston and the US Justice Department have created another walking, talking billboard for the psychotic side of Islam.

The Ummah can provide all the martyrs that the traffic will bear, which may explain why Islamists are winning. Death and maiming from terror is epidemic, the caliphates are back, ISIS is real, Ramadi and Palmyra have fallen, and 90 nations, including England and America, now provide warriors for the  jihad. What next?

When Baghdad or Damascus falls, will we still be calling Muslim jihad a criminal enterprise, an aberration, a misreading of Islam? How much worse do things have to become before the reality of war with religious fascism is acknowledged?

America is losing to militant Muslims at home and abroad because the legal and national security establishment can’t admit that jihad is war. Team Obama can’t admit that Islamic terrorists are soldiers. Never mind that no enemy was ever pacified by appeasement, no war was ever won by suits with law degrees. If ISIS or the Caucuses Caliphate are criminal enterprises, shouldn’t al Baghdadi be on the FBI’s Most Wanted List?

Nonetheless, politicized lawyers, like their foreign policy counterparts, are now required to do a televised victory lap after each real or imagined achievement. The Marathon bomber trail was no exception. Never mind that a Tsarnnaev conviction was a slam dunk. A pyrrhic victory is nothing without knee-jerk political spin. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s post-trial press conference performance on 15 May was another photo op for the team Obama party line on crime, terror, and Islam.

The US Attorney for Massachusetts was quick to claim that America was not intimidated by “terror and radical ( read Islamist) ideas,” asserting  that “religion” (read Islam)  was not part of the motivation no matter what the perps may have claimed. Ortiz also claimed that the Tsarnaevs “did not act on behalf” of Muslims no matter what they may have confessed. Ortiz seemed to be channeling Hillary Clinton, telling listeners that this was not a time for “moral debate” -- or reality therapy it seems.

The US Attorney’s dismissal of morality is typical of a profession where religious moral equivalence is now settled law. C.S. Lewis, among others, put the lie to such flawed assumptions: “If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.” Surely logic is not Carmen’s stronge suit. Ortiz came down squarely on the side of savages on 15 May.

The US Attorney for Massachusetts insisted that “our thoughts should turn away” from the Tsarnaevs, indeed, we “should turn the page.” Mrs. Ortiz was every bit the apologist, every bit the appeaser, never mustering the intellectual courage to mention motive: Islam, Islamists, jihad, or the larger global war.  Indeed, Carmen Ortiz dodged every obvious conclusion about terror, war, and Islamism that we have come to expect short of replaying Hillary’s, “What does it matter?”

Mrs. Ortiz seems to be another Obama era strategic sycophant, clueless and proud of it. What we know about Tsarnaev motives is the same as that which we ignore about Shite and Sunni inspiration worldwide -- celebratory phrasing like “allahu akbar, allahu akbar!” Islamists and jihadists, individually and collectively, make no secret of their religious motives. Yet somehow Justice Department epigones like Mrs. Ortiz know better, feel compelled to ignore the evidence, dismissing all those religious footprints.

Ortiz is dead wrong. Tsarnaev will not pay for anything anytime soon. The good citizens of Boston will pay, twice: first as the victims of the Marathon atrocity, then as a tortured audience for another endless, if not obscene, American legal circus. Punks like Tsarnaev and Hasan posturing in the center ring for decades is a joke not justice. The real victims will soon be forgotten while a couple of Islamic thugs work the American system endlessly with appeals, special privileges, and the kind of sick celebrity that fakirs cherish – all at US taxpayer expense.

 The US Attorney for Massachusetts should, however, get high marks for staying on message. Those who admit the least can usually be expected to obey the best.

G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.