We do not need intelligence gurus to discover the motivations behind the Muslim brothers who perpetrated the Boston Marathon murders and mayhem. Shakespeare discerned the answer more than four centuries ago in The Merchant of Venice, about which more anon. There is nothing new under the sun.
Contemplate the following. Republican Presidential candidate in 2008 and current Senator John McCain maintains: "[T]he Constitution establishes the United States of America as a Christian nation." All 166 Guantanamo Bay prisoners are Muslim. Predator drone killings in the thousands have targeted exclusively Muslims largely in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen. In 1953, the United States orchestrated the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in favor of the Shah. We armed the Shah to the teeth and provided nuclear technology. At present, we support Israeli assassinations of Iranian scientists and cyber attacks to sabotage Iran's nuclear ambitions while acquiescing in Israel's hundreds of nuclear warheads developed outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
For approximately 60 years since the Mossadegh overthrow, the United States has provided material assistance to oppressive Muslim regimes in the Middle East or South Asia through bribery, weapons sales, or the stationing or use of troops or Navy ships. (The United States criminally punishes material assistance by any private individual to a foreign terrorist organization.)
The United States stations 15,000 troops in Kuwait to bolster the House of Sabah which has been ruling tyrannically for three centuries. The U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, fortifies an oppressive Sunni regime against a Shiite majority. In Saudi Arabia, which prohibits liberty as a matter of principle, the Central Intelligence Agency operates a drone base employed to terrorize neighboring Yemen. The CIA is also assisting the House of Saud arm Sunni terrorists in Syria. The United States stationed troops in Saudi Arabia until 2003.
For long years when King Hussein was on the throne in Jordan, he was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency. The United States is training Syrian rebels on Jordanian territory who are engaged in a violent campaign against secularism, Shi'ism, and Christianity in Syria. The United States propped up the regime of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak with billions in annual military aid before his overthrow in 2011. The United States continues to provide military assistance to the successor regime of President Mohamed Morsi. We recently negotiated the sale of weapons to the United Arab Emirates despite its escalating human rights abuses.
These examples are but the tip of the iceberg. For more than 60 years, the United States has manipulated the internal affairs of every Muslim nation in the Middle East or South Asia by material assistance to advance our perceived interests. We have been and remain morally complicit in the respective tyrannies or oppressions of the regimes. Retaliation of some sort should be no surprise. To paraphrase from The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1:
"Hath not a Muslim eyes? hath not a Muslim hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that...The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction."
Muslim antagonism towards the United States would not have awakened if we had refrained from material military, economic, or diplomatic assistance in favor of oppressive Muslim regimes. That should be our current policy, as it was before the United States degenerated from a Republic to an Empire. Before the fall, then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams elaborated on the foreign policy of the Republic in words that have never been bettered: "But [America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own...[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind."
Blowback against United States interventions is as certain as Newton's laws of motion. Shakespeare's Macbeth explained: "But in the case [of assassination] we still have judgment here; that we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor: thus even-handed justice commends the ingredient of our poison'd chalice to our own lips."