I'll say this
again.
I'm basing what I am saying on this:
- FBI investigation that proves that the YouTube activity was one of the Tsarnaev brothers
If they do, the facts of the older brothers opinions about the US as well as his Aug 2012 and on activity on videos that are preaching hateful speech (several of the videos were taken down before the bombings due to EULA violations and were cited as hate speech by YouTube) and jihad. Then this guy sets off a bomb within 7 months of the spike of Muslim extremist activity.
I've also said before that these guys don't represent Islam and they are, for the most part, seen as scumbags to the Muslim community. However, it doesn't mean they don't exist and pretending that young men aren't getting manipulated by a religious-based idealism is nothing short of naive.
There are muslim extremists out there. They have money and they have resources. They're not villagers in a shack in Afghanistan. Those are the cannon fodder. AQ is sophisticated.
Colleges recruit online. Companies recruit online. To try to pretend like AQ and other sympathetic organizations don't recruit online or look for patterns in someone's posting history is really naive.
Just ask yourself, if you were trying to recruit for a fundamentalist organization... wouldn't you take advantage of the biggest resource available to you?
You would. And they do as well.
Again, I'm not saying he was recruited by AQ. He certainly didn't come here as a AQ but it is certainly a possibility that his posting history through YouTube was noticed and he was contacted.
I made that clear when I said it above but I guess it was past the 5 word threshold some people seem to have. I really need to work on posting in the Twitter age.