Better in their words…

Evil. Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s call radical Islam what it actually is: evil.
===============

Before we move on from Boston—move on from psychoanalyzing the Brothers Tsarnaev, and their parents; move on from fretting about when, exactly, Dzhokhar should have his Miranda rights read to him; move on from the (irrelevant) history lesson about Chechnya; move on from the speechifying about the importance of tolerance; move on from the search for terrorist connections, Islamist influences and personal motives; move on, period—let’s remind ourselves just what this duo was up to on the afternoon of April 15, 2013.

It wasn’t merely to terrorize, though that was a big part of it. It wasn’t merely to kill, though they succeeded there, too, with names that should not just go down the memory hole: Krystle Campbell, 29, a restaurant manager; Lu Lingzi, 23, a Chinese graduate student at Boston University; Martin Richard, 8, a boy from Dorchester; and Sean Collier, 26, an MIT police officer ambushed by the brothers three days later.

The main intention, certainly the main effect, was to send a thousand tiny metal knives flying at supersonic speeds in every direction from the blast. That is what Palestinian “engineers” do when they add nails and ball bearings—and, sometimes, rat poison—to the vests of suicide bombers. These are maiming operations, in their own class of cruel. It’s what the Tsarnaevs had been up to for many weeks, perhaps months, probably without misgivings or second thoughts.

Imagine the hours spent building the bombs. The innocent-seeming trip to a store to buy those Fagor-brand pressure cookers. (Was a salesman on hand to explain the difference between the “Rapid Express,” “Futuro” or “Chef” lines?) The more furtive search for the ideal explosive. (Did the Tsarnaevs come across the “Do-It-Yourself Gunpowder Cookbook,” bizarrely available on Amazon?) The purchase of nails, ball bearings, and other small, pointed metallic pieces at some hardware store. The mixing of the ingredients, the construction of the triggers, the testing of the timers, the fitting into the backpacks.

Also, the thought given to where to plant the bombs, and when: Better near the finish line, where the crowds will stand closer together; better late in the race, so fewer police would be paying close attention to a couple of guys in baseball caps.

And then the explosions. And the panic. And the cascade of blood on the street.

A friend of mine, a doctor in Boston, had the task of triaging victims of the bombing as they arrived at the hospital where he works. “It smelled like lots and lots of fresh blood,” he said. “Part of that was the amount of blood being lost. Part of that was the amount of blood being poured into people.” This, too, was a desired effect, central to the Tsarnaevs’ plan.

I have my own experience of what a bombing of this sort looks like. In January 2004 I was living in Jerusalem when a suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus down the street from my apartment. I was on the scene in about three minutes.

“The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted,” I wrote later that day. “Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.”

Rereading these lines all these years later, I’m struck by how far they fall short of capturing my memory of the event, of the experience of it. But human carnage is beyond description, a fact known mainly to those—now including several hundred people in Boston—who have seen it for themselves. To see it is to understand it; to understand it is to have no real words for it.

That’s why so much of the commentary about Boston seems so curiously off point. It treats the horror of what was done, and the nihilism that was required to do it, as mere givens. Why spend any time staring mutely into the abyss when we could be speaking sagely about, say, the alienation of angry young Muslim men? Or the pros and cons of Twitter during the course of a manhunt? Or, for that matter, the uplifting example shown by the people of Boston in caring for the wounded and keeping their cool while the Tsarnaevs were still on the loose?

Aren’t these all fitter subjects for a constructive discussion?

Maybe they are. But we cannot begin to comprehend what happened in Boston until we think longer about the evil that has been done there. Before you go into constructive mode, reflect on what, and who, has been destroyed. Ask yourself: By whom? In whose name? For the sake of what?

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 23, 2013, on page A21 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Evil in Boston.

Bret Stephens: The Evil in Boston – WSJ.com.