Will it be a recurring nightmare?

Andrew McCarthy is the most knowledgeable person I know of regarding the radical ideology of Islamic supremacism. He warns at National Review that Jihad will not be wished away, but he believes willful blindness will continue to be the order of the day. Willful blindness about Islamic Jihad. The dead Muslim brother in Boston - Tamerlan — "namesake of a 14th-century Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary for their brutalization of non-Muslims."

Brutalizing our own non-Muslim country has been the principal objective of jihadists for the last 20 years. This week marks a new and chilling chapter: the introduction on our shores of the tactics the self-styled mujahideen have used to great, gory effect for the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At a point in the race timed to achieve maximum carnage, the Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon with improvised explosive devices. IEDs are small but potent homemade bombs — crude explosives and unforgiving shrapnel encased in easily portable pressure cookers. The bombs are simple to make. They won’t kill thousands or even hundreds of people like hijacked planes or heavy chemical explosives will. But that’s not the objective. The goal is to instill terror into the flow of everyday life. IEDs are made for “soft” targets. They are easily camouflaged amid the traffic, the everyday debris, and the eight-year-old boys frolicking as they wait for Dad to cross the finish line.

What does McCarthy recommend we do about the fact that we are in a war driven by ideology?

understanding its teaching, reluctantly accepting that its teaching will inevitably lead some Muslims to strike out savagely, and committing to a pro-active, intelligence-based counterterrorism strategy — one that scraps political correctness and ferrets out the jihadists before they strike.

If we do not?

There are all kinds of Islam, including the supremacist kind that is far more widely held than we’re comfortable acknowledging. Until we get beyond that discomfort, until we are prepared to ask, “What Islam?” — and until we are prepared to treat Islamic supremacism as the pariah it should be — Boston’s hellish week will remain our recurring nightmare.