Mark Steyn: No other word for it but slaughter

The Australian ^ | September 6 2004 | Mark Steyn

[Pitiricus]

PHOTOGRAPHED from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it's only when you peer closer that you realise that that's because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They're children. Row upon row of dead children, more than a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.

Flee from whom? Let's take three representative responses: "Guerillas", said The New York Times. "Chechen separatists", ventured the BBC, eventually settling for "hostage-takers". "Insurgents", said The Guardian's Isabel Hilton, hyper-rational to a fault: "Today's hostage-taking," she explained, "is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly . . . If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets – the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved – become targets because they are available."

And then there was Adam Nicolson in London's Daily Telegraph, who filed one of those ornately anguished columns full of elevated, overwritten allusions – each child was "a Pieta, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V" – and yet in a thousand words he's too busy honing his limpid imagery to confront the fact that this foul deed had perpetrators, never mind the identity of those perpetrators....

[ApesForEvolution]

BTTT

[Lurker]

"You can't turn Saudi Arabia and Yemen into New Hampshire or Sweden (according to taste), but if you could transform them into Singapore or Papua New Guinea or Belize or just about anything else you'd be making an immense improvement."

How about we just turn them into wastelands. It would only take an hour or so. In a couple years, civilized people could move in and build Hiltons and golf courses.

Then, the parents of those dead kids could urinate on the still slightly radioactive dust that used to be Mecca.

L

[workerbee]

What happened in one Russian schoolhouse is an abomination that has to be defeated, not merely regretted. But the only guys with any kind of plan are the Bush administration.

DEFEATED, NOT MERELY REGRETTED! Hear that, you anti-Bush protesting punks??? Get your heads out of your butts and wake the hell up!

[Feiny]

Fantastic summation. Funny thing, one of my (rational) anti-bush friends sent me the article by Isabel Hilton today & I was in the process of responding. Steyn saved me the time and said it better than I ever could.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[Do Be]

Well said.

This is what our media needs to be saying. If they cannot begin speaking the truth, they need to be replaced by those who can.

[TADSLOS]

I wonder if, as they killed those schoolchildren, they chanted "Allahu Akbar!"

Eyewitness accounts say that they did.

[johnb838]

If the Russian children are innocent, the Russian state is not. Its ham-fisted campaign in Chechnya is as brutal as it is ineffectual.

I don't agree with this. I think the Russians need to get much MORE ham-fisted right now. SOMEBODY HAS GOT TO DIE FOR THE SAKE OF THOSE CHILDREN!!!!! Right now I'm not sure I care who as long as they're muzzies.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Steyn makes some magnificent points.
However, I wouldn't allow the IRA and ETA etc. off the hook so easily. Enniskillen, the Madrid bombings - no minor acts of terror in their own right.

That's right. I'm not as familiar with the ETA (though it's a Communist terrorist outfit as well), but I'm old enough to remember the IRA planting bombs that killed innocent families (often Catholic) and their responsibility for blasts in London as well that could not help but kill innocent people of all ages and conditions. Their love of violence and death always seemed to me the same sick philosophy of the jihadis.

And the ANC were no saints either.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Did he claim that the massacre was in retaliation for decades of support of Israel by Russia?

Oh wait, that's right . . . Buchanan thinks Israel secretly ran Russia all those years and the Soviet pro-Arab policy was a ruse!

[baseballmom]

Brilliant Steyn. No need for lies, er...uh, flowery prose in the telling of this atrocity.

[maxwellp]

God help the WORLD if Kerry is elected President of the U.S.

[bitt]

This is the War of Islamic Expansion. Let's call it what it is, who the enemy is and why it's the enemy.

PRETTY SOON, PEOPLE ARE NO LONGER GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM CALLING IT "THE NEW CRUSADES".

[MNnice]

This is an unusual Steyn piece. He's damn pissed.

[JulieRNR21]

[UltraKonservativen]

"MURDERERS", "TERRORIST", "SCUMBAGS", "KILLERS","DEMONS" Lord,I can't find a word strong enough to describe the men and women who did this.

[moonhawk]

But the ETA didn't do the Madrid bombings...

Not that I'm defending them, of course, but a group with ties to Al Qaida took responsibility, if I'm not mistaken.

[madison10]

What would Bush to if our school children were slaughtered? What would kerry do?

President Bush would take care of the business of the U.S & protecting us...fast. Kerry would have several weeks of meetings to determine how to make himself look best in the "situation."

Maybe Mr. Kerry would attack...maybe he'd have a hug-fest with the enemy.

[dsc]

"PRETTY SOON, PEOPLE ARE NO LONGER GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM CALLING IT "THE NEW CRUSADES".

People have a problem with that?

My only problem is that as a 53-year-old military retiree in bad health, the odds are against my getting behind a trigger.

[CardCarryingMember.VastRightWC]

If you want your religion to be more than a diseased death cult, you're going to have to take a stand.

Might be a good tagline here somewhere ..... Perhaps something like, "Religion of Peace? Or Diseased Death Cult? You decide."