2:50 p.m. Silence.

I was standing in front of my son’s high school in Brookline, Boston, where students were supposed to stand silent for a minute exactly one week after the Marathon bombings: few seemed to care. The CNN is desperate to keep the story alive with “exclusive details” (Anderson Cooper: pressure cookers used in attack were bought at Macy’s) and meaningless “breaking news” (my old friend Nic Robertson, hastily dispatched to Daghestan, spoke with the suspects’ mother who says: Allahu akbar!): a nice try to recover from the network’s flawed reporting in the first days of the manhunt. Media aside, everyone here is eager to go back to normality. Boylston Street is still closed but it will reopen by midweek. Stars&Stripes are at half mast but will rise again soon. Funerals and prayers for the three Marathon victims (Krystle Marie Campbell, 29; Lu Lingzi, 23; Richard Martin, 8) and the murdered MIT policeman (Sean Collier, 26) were held yesterday and today. Letters, flowers, flags, postcards and balloons are slowly fading from the improvised memorial near Copley Square. After all, “BOSTON STRONG” proclaim the posters and the banners at every corner of the city. After all, the good guys with the bullet proof vests and the night vision helmets have won: thumbs up! Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, “the boxer”, “the mastermind”, was gunned down on Friday; his wounded 19 year old brother Dzhokhar “the nice boy”, who is recovering in hospital, has been already charged with killing people with WMD (first time a cooker is named a weapon of mass destruction) and is facing a life sentence or the death chamber. Mission accomplished? Not really…Boston may be strong but the West looks painfully weak.

Security agencies, governments and the public opinion are too slowly understanding what was clear since the 2004-2005 Madrid and London train/subway bombings and has been proved last January during the terrorist storming of a gas plant in Algeria: the threat is no longer al-Qaeda or foreign fanatics but people who grew up in the West, young men in their 20s who often come from secular childhoods and want to break with their parents’ lives, self made jihadists who surf the internet and get radicalized on the web. It’s much more difficult to fight them because they live with us, they are our neighbours, our sons’ schoolmates and sportsmates: they come from inside. That’s why we want to rush back quickly to normality. We are scared to acknowledge that the terrorists are between us.

Note:

The fallout from the Marathon bombings has dumped Obama’s gun control bill and is now likely to slow down and affect the new immigration law on Capitol Hill.