(Yeah, Slado and Zero, I'm talking to you. You want to see what Christians are capable of doing to Muslims, open the above link. WARNING: Some of the photos in that link, which is part of a Russian-language photo journal from the First Chechen War, are quite gruesome in nature and are definitely not for the timid and squeamish. But if one wants to truly understand the horror that the Russians visited upon the Chechen people, they're worth a view.)

Officially, the Russian military casualties in the First Chechen War (1994-96) were 5,500 dead, although most other reliable estimates place that number as probably closer to 14,000 killed. For their part, Chechen guerillas suffered upwards of 30,000 dead, and upwards of 100,000 Chechen civilians were killed from aerial bombardment by Russian planes. Further, as many as 500,000 to 750,000 civilians were displaced by the initial Russian invasion and subsequent fighting, which resulted in a negotiated Russian withdrawal from Chechnya once their occupying army in Grozny came under seige by Chechen fighters in the surrounding mountains, and Russian forces outside the region proved unable to break the guerillas' grip and relieve their compatriots.

The secessionist Chechen government subsequently proved to be very ineffectual in maintaining any real authority over the country outside the capital. Following Vladimir Putin's succession to power in the Kremlin, the new Russian president ordered his armed forces to re-enter Chechnya and re-assert his government's authority over what had clearly devolved into a lawless region ruled by local warlords, who in turn had freely invaded the neighboring Russian state of Dagestan.

The Second Chechen War, which began in the summer of 1999, resulted in the additional deaths of apparoximately 11,000 Russian soldiers and 16,000 Chechen guerillas, along with another estimated 25,000 civilians died in the crossfire. Another 200,000-plus Chechen refugees fled the resumption of fighting to neighboring states. Only this time, more than 600 Russian civilians died in Russia proper when Chechen militants began carrying out terrorist reprisals in Moscow and elsewhere.

(Those reprisals against Russian civilians, including one particularly brutal attack in September 2004 in which 186 schoolchildren and 148 adults were taken hostage and then killed in the southern Russian town of Beslan, drew near-universal condemnation from abroad and did much to dampen and alleviate what had heretofore been strong internationalist sympathy for the Chechen cause.)

The Chechen people, like their neighbors in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, have historically suffered greatly at the hands of the Russians. Josef Stalin went so far as to deport the entire population of Chechnya in the mid-1940s to Kazakhstan and Siberia, because they took advantage of the German invasion during the Second World War to rise up against their Soviet masters. They were only allowed to return to the Caucasus region beginning in 1957, at a time when Nikita Krushchev was seeking to bolster and secure his own standing as Soviet leader by undoing much of his predecessor's reviled legacy.

It is that brutal backdrop of carnage in Chechnya which the Tsarnaev family sought desperately to escape in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, the unyielding emotional toll from that remorseless conflict may have followed them as they tried to rebuild their lives in America. And while we're still far from certain this is the case, it's also entirely possible that the Caucasus region's freewheeling history of violence and reprisal may have reached out and consumed their two sons.

Why yes. Yes you did.

That is so wrong.

But, at the same time, it is just so "you."

Sorry, not true.

Not sure why we need to sugar coat this?

We don't need to cast a wide net around all of Islam but it is undeniable that a certain strain is causing otherwise normal people to do horrible things.   We don't need to play the moral equivalency game to put this in the proper perspective.