[jocon307]

"Islam IS the enemy..."

So it appears to be.

[tallhappy]

By forcing the gov't to attack a school rigged with bombs, a great toll of human life is taken.

I think immediate response has to happen. Immediate. Before they set up their bombs and separate the men and women and children and kill the strong men and make their sham demands.

Less will die that way than waiting.

GLOBAL JIHAD Chechen terrorists follow al-Qaida manual Russia school hostage-takers' cues from online playbook

[Keith in Iowa]

There should not have been any terrorists in jail whose release could be demanded - they should have been executed to begin with.

[LibWhacker]

Because it cannot be defended against, you can expect to see this happen again, and again, and again.

It can be defended against. But at the moment the civilized world lacks the will to do what needs to be done; namely, the extermination of the subhuman scum. I think that'll very likely change if attacks like this continue.

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

I seem to recall the common sense argument that some adults in every school in America should be armed. It's that little notion of self defense. Terrorists can't rig explosives to blow up your children if they are dead on the floor, riddled with bullets.

[xm177e2]

The attack on the school was not the beginning. It is part of the middle. This terror war has been going on for a very long time. Do you remember the Opera House takeover over a year ago? Terror attacks with deaths in the hundreds are not unusual for Russia. The war has been going on for a very long time, and will continue for a very long time.

[JimVT]

I have a feeling the Russkies are going to take retaliatory action a lot faster than we would have.

[js1138]

This tactic will be the beginning of the end for Islam. A religion without moral authority has nothing. It will take generations for the corpse to rot, but it is dead.

[muawiyah]

Looked much more like an attack than a "test".

Here's what's going on in this sort of thing ~ to shoot young children in the back you have to overcome your built in moral standards, one of which is to "protect the young".

This takes an overwhelming threat to one's own person, or an ideological standard that identifies your targets as somehow not being human.

Islam provides both.

[stockpirate]

Does anyone out there think that the timing of this event had nothing to do with the Republican convention?

And that the ending of this event had nothing to do with the ending of the Republican convention.

They started the shootout just as the morning was breaking on the east coast in an effort to damage the convention. They have underestimated the US people.

[Nova]

---you can't protect them all!---

The overwhelming majority of us do just that!

[johnb838]

As soon as we re-elect the President, he can go back on the offensive. The more we run the score up, the stronger a hand he can play. Get out the vote.

[ThanhPhero]

In taking on the Russians the Moslems are going against an enemy not terribly more civilized than the Moslems, at least in their approach to war.

It is not to our advantage to sit around now and let the Russians win this war on their own. They will then be the threat to us that the USSR was. I do not refer here to the skirmishes in Chechnya but to the wider Islamic War. Russia must be induced to limit its responsibility to the Islamists within its own borders. We do that by continuing to vigorously pursue the war in the rest of the world ourselves. That means dealing soon with Korea and Iran.

[JOE43270]

This is not the beginning. This has been ongoing. Look back in History. We have to be one America to beat these low lifes that will kill us and their own children by making Martyrs out of them. I'm not being Political at all in this. You cannot beat people like this with the more the sensitive mr. kerry and his ambulance chasing wonder boy.

[propertius]

Don't get me wrong, what happened in North Ossetia was an act of unspeakable barbarity, and one that merits a swift, coordinated and forceful response.

But let us put this in a little context. Vladimir Putin, a scheming, dangerous ex-KGB head honcho, is seeking carte blanche for a brutal response in Chechnya.

For much of the late 1990s, Putin waged a war against the Chechen people that was characterised by countless human rights abuses and the deaths of thousands of civilians -- one that was condemned around the world.

Do we want to see a return to that?

Before I am accused of shameless peacenickery by those rightly appalled at yesterday's events who would point out that many, perhaps most Chechens support the Islamic separatists and their al-Qa'eda backers, can I point the following out:

If Putin was motivated by a genuine determination to defeat terrorism around the world rather than by a desire to revive Russia as a superpower, would he not have been a little more supportive of the U.S. and Britain over the last two years, rather than placing himself firmly in the France camp?

It is not as though terrorist acts like yesterday's are new in Russia. The Moscow apartment bombings preceded 9/11

[Gorzaloon]

Its a No-Win scenerio. The World's horror makes this a rousing success for Al Queda. Because it cannot be defended against, you can expect to see this happen again, and again, and again. ---> BTW, notice the great silence from muslin clerics about this. There was no great cry from Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, or Eqypt to "Let the children go!" Islam IS the enemy...

I think many good people tend to forget the darker side of Human Nature. Here is a gentle reminder:

Not long ago, there was a civilized country that gave the world much culture and scientific attainment. They became infuriated about "an enemy within", and more than six million people were killed, for nothing much more than talking funny and running pawn shops.

No one is immune to this, especially where slaughter of innocents are concerned, no matter how well-meaning, or how Liberal.

Bluntly put, if these acts continue, there will certainly come a time when there are not going to be any Muslims, anywhere. It took only the flimsiest excuses for the Holocaust to happen.

There is nothing flimsy about 9-11 or this latest outrage. I am NOT talking about hate, but about something colder: The kind of grim determination a person feels who sees a cockroach and reaches for the spray can. It is not hatred, but simply the recognition that there is a somewhat disagreeable job to be done, then, onto the next thing-Mowing the lawn, and cleaning the carpets.

[Dustbunny]

I'll bet the town and it's people are Christian.

[Quix]

i STRONGLY agree.

[sharktrager]

The start?

Russia has been dealing with terrorism of this sort, almost all al Queda connected, since before 9/11. This one only differs in that they directly, instead of indirectly, involved children.

This is far from the start. If anything, it is the start of the end as Russia and some fence-sitting nations decide they want to help our effort globally instead of treating their problems as internal issues.