Posted on 09/06/2004 1:18:11 PM PDT by quidnunc
Suddenly, a far-away country about which most of us know little has shot to the very forefront of our minds and consciences. In a new century already steeped in horror, what happened at the Russian school in Beslan plumbs new depths of barbarity.
The carefully planned slaughter of hundreds of children, a massacre of innocents mown down inside their school by zealots who bayoneted one when he asked for water and who blew others up or shot them in cold blood, is a monstrosity which has had a profound effect upon those who watched in horror as the tragedy unfolded.
The hellish images — of murder, of screaming terror, of naked and starving children forced to eat the flowers they had brought to school or drink their own urine — will surely serve to define our terrorised age. It is impossible to comprehend how human beings can behave like this to anyone, let alone to children.
And that incomprehension makes us realise that we are dealing here with something that is as terrifying as it is diabolical — people who no longer behave as recognisable human beings, who are in the grip of a religious hysteria so profound that human life is of no consequence whatsoever, except as a means to terrorise the world.
-snip-
For I do not believe this was an isolated episode in a fight between Chechen separatists and the Russian government. This was Russia’s 9/11, part of the global jihad being waged against all infidels — Americans, Europeans, Russians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or moderate Muslims — in order to re-establish the medieval Islamic global empire. It was, in short, further evidence that we are embroiled in a world war.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at melaniephillips.com ...
I'm glad you mentioned sarcasm. You were about to get "tanned" in the 21st Century definition!!
READ THIS TOO.
Ya gotta wonder WTF this guy is doing in the UK. He should be shot and deported.
Cleric supports targeting children
By Rajeev Syal
(Filed: 05/09/2004)
An extremist Islamic cleric based in Britain said yesterday that he would support hostage-taking at British schools if carried out by terrorists with a just cause.
Omar Bakri Mohammed, the spiritual leader of the extremist sect al-Muhajiroun, said that holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course of action for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Mohammed said: "If an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain, it would be justified because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq.
"As long as the Iraqi did not deliberately kill women and children, and they were killed in the crossfire, that would be okay."
Mr Mohammed, 44, who lives in Edmonton, north London, but is originally from Syria, also claimed that the Chechen rebels were not responsible for the deaths of more than 350 people - at least half of them children - who are so far known to have died in Beslan. (* WHAT?? He thinks they shot themselves??? - DRY632*)
"The Mujahideen [Chechen rebels] would not have wanted to kill those people, because it is strictly forbidden as a Muslim to deliberately kill women and children. It is the fault of the Russians," he said.
The father of seven came to Britain in 1985 after being deported from Saudi Arabia because of his membership of a banned group. (* This sounds as stupid as Canada. BANNED from Saudi Arabia for being too radical so he moves to the UK!! and they let him!!!!! DUH. Why he isn't in Canada or New Jersey is anyone's guess- DRY632*) He has since been given leave by the Home Office to remain in Britain for five years but the Government is reviewing his status.
He gave an interview yesterday to promote a "celebratory" conference in London next Saturday to commemorate the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
Andrew Dismore, the Labour MP for Hendon, was infuriated by Mr Mohammed's comments. "That sounds to me like incitement and I will report him to Scotland Yard," he said. "It is an insult to most moderate Muslims, who are sick of people like this claiming to represent them."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/05/wosse705.xml
Welcome To Free Republic.
Thank you. Just found the sirte thru the posting of Melanie's article. GOD! It's nice to find these little wells of sanity in a world full of HATE BUSH and It's all about OIL, the CNN BS line and what the educrats are brainwashing our kids with.
Hi all.
It's mindboggling to think that this isn't being addressed. I sure hope you're right, Terpfen. God help us all, if you're not. Really, what in the h#$$ does it take for nations to band together, say, ENOUGH"...and address the situation. If we don't, we're next.
Welcome aboard! There are more of us than you think.
Clinton wasn't asleep at the switch. He didn't care about the looming danger to this country. Any shrink worth his/her diploma would tell you Clinton is a sociopath who lacks normal feelings of empathy toward others. He's extremely clever, as many sociopaths are, and hides this flaw most of the time. Occasional failures: see Ron Brown's funeral pics, Juanita Broderick's rape and aftermath. Clinton is a narcissist, too. He sees the world through a prism of self interest, as if he's wearing blinders. He suffered a huge p.r. failure with Somalia and thereafter was loathe to use the military for anything but dropping a few bombs or shooting missiles at desert tents. So he was extremely reluctant to do anything meaningful, like seizing bin Laden and putting a stop to Al Qaeda. As a result Americans were murdered by the thousands.
He had the colossal gall to tell assembled Rwandans, at the end of his presidency, while Air Force One, engines still running, sat on the tarmac, that he'd never been told genocide had been taking place in their country. Bald-faced lies, the bible that got bigger every time he showed up in church...in the midst of impeachment hearings. The list is endless. Suffice it to say that constant fawning by the MSM
over Clinton is sickening. The truth is we're very lucky we survived 8 years of Clinton in the WH.
You wrote:
"In this case, you've guessed wrongly. WTFR=Welcome To Free Republic..."
Ouch, I was thinking of RTFM, as in "read the ... manual".
Thank you for a more polite welcome than I was expecting.
No fratricide here, eh?
You wrote:
"The truth is we're very lucky we survived 8 years of Clinton in the WH."
Lucky, or blessed by God.
I'm still *quite* worried about nuclear secrets and
guidance systems to China;
proliferation (no, NOT pro-lifer-ation; that's another thread) to North Korea;
obvious ability of all countries to inflitrate the National Laboratories;
etc.
Anyone remember the Wen Ho Lee affair?
I suspect the "racism" charge was a clever ruse by
the Clintons as the only way to defuse the investigation.
It'd be the perfect PC cover.
And the *best part* is, whether Lee was guilty, or just
an innocent scapegoat to take the heat off of others, once the PC police got involved from the racism, things tended
to die off. . .
You can't? That is just too easy, he never made any decision that would have a negative affect on his poll numbers PERIOD
And now Clinton is an advisor to Kerry. Last night he told him to stop talking about Vietnam and focus on the economy. So today Kerry came up with W=wrong.
I got a better idea. It's just a nickle/iron meteorite. We ought to send in a Special Forces team and steal it. Then put it on a rocket and send it to the back side of the moon. Then tell the muslim world, "When you 8th century b*stards can retrieve it, we'll talk."
No, Clinton was worse than that. He thought he could appease them by giving them air support so they could conquer parts of Yugoslavia. Anyone wonder where the Beslan murderers got their NATO-issue fatigues?
Welcome Dave632!
Pull up a chair, pour yourself a coffee (or whatever floats your boat!) and make yerself at home!
LOL!! I like that idea! That's very creative!
My theory? It would upset the tolerance applecart.
There is no difference in these Islamic radicals and the Nazis and Communists. We have a new enemy. They must be destroyed. We cannot show mercy. May God direct our wonderful president as he attempts to decide what is right.
Their reasoning was as follows: The international news services were referring to the perpetrators of the Russian school massacre as "guerillas" or "Chechen separatists." The only time they would use the word "terrorist" was when quoting George W. Bush. They said if the word couldn't be used to describe the murderers of hundreds of children, then it had no legitmate use.
I see your nuke Mecca and raise you one nuke Tehran.
Suddenly, a far-away country about which most of us know little has shot to the very forefront of our minds and consciences. In a new century already steeped in horror, what happened at the Russian school in Beslan plumbs new depths of barbarity.
The carefully planned slaughter of hundreds of children, a massacre of innocents mown down inside their school by zealots who bayoneted one when he asked for water and who blew others up or shot them in cold blood, is a monstrosity which has had a profound effect upon those who watched in horror as the tragedy unfolded.
The hellish images — of murder, of screaming terror, of naked and starving children forced to eat the flowers they had brought to school or drink their own urine — will surely serve to define our terrorised age. It is impossible to comprehend how human beings can behave like this to anyone, let alone to children.
And that incomprehension makes us realise that we are dealing here with something that is as terrifying as it is diabolical —people who no longer behave as recognisable human beings, who are in the grip of a religious hysteria so profound that human life is of no consequence whatsoever, except as a means to terrorise the world.
The Russian government has rightly been criticised for the appalling shambles of the operation to free the hostages. President Putin has acknowledged the fundamental mistakes that were made. But what happened at that school has the gravest possible implications for all of us.
For I do not believe this was an isolated episode in a fight between Chechen separatists and the Russian government. This was Russia’s 9/11, part of the global jihad being waged against all infidels —Americans, Europeans, Russians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or moderate Muslims— in order to re-establish the medieval Islamic global empire. It was, in short, further evidence that we are embroiled in a world war.
For the Muslim world, the Beslan massacre may be some kind of watershed. For it has prompted some unusually forthright self-criticism by various writers and thinkers. Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al Arabiya television, for example, has urged Muslims to admit the ‘scandalous facts’ that most terrorists for the past decade have been Muslims and that this is the result of a ‘corrupted culture’.
Yet even now, some in the west still don’t get it. Such people say the Beslan atrocity was caused by the war on Iraq, which has created yet more Islamic terrorists. But this is to get history totally back to front.
The attempt to impose an Islamic state in Chechnya goes as far back as 1858. In recent times, the issue was reignited after first Boris Yeltsin and then President Putin brutally put down a renewed Chechen revolt. But after the Chechen terrorist mastermind Shamil Basayev took control in 1994, the revolt accelerated. Hundreds of people were murdered after Basayev took thousands hostage at two separate hospitals in Russia.
As al Qaeda grew stronger and bolder throughout the nineties, Basayev’s terrorists are said to have found it expedient to make use of its money, weaponry, training and organisational skills. The aim of Chechen separatism mutated into the explicit agenda of establishing an Islamic empire across the whole of the north Caucasus.
As the agenda shifted, the horrors increased. In October 2002, 129 hostages died after the terrorists seized a Moscow theatre; in February, a human bomb killed more than 40 people on the Moscow subway; and last month, two Russian airliners were blown up in midair, killing 89 people. To say that all this was the result of the war on Iraq reveals a startling dislocation from reality.
Like the Russian atrocities, the taking of the two French hostages and the massacre of Nepalese workers in Iraq are said by some to bear the hallmarks of al Qaeda involvement. Yet Nepal was not involved in the war, and France opposed it. No matter. The agenda is the same: war against the infidel anywhere Islam has a claim or a grievance.
It is argued, though, that the war on Iraq has merely recruited yet more enraged Muslims to al Qaeda’s cause. But it was al Qaeda that attacked the west, not the other way round; and it was Saddam’s Iraq that carried out acts of terror against the US. The west is merely seeking to defend itself in a war that has been declared upon it. In wars, repeated attacks take place. To blame this not on our attackers but on ourselves takes appeasement to new depths of absurdity.
And this is a war unlike any other we have known. It is not being fought between states or with conventional armies. Its perpetrators hide their fighters among civilian populations, so to act against them produces an outcry. They target civilians in order to terrorise and demoralise. And they use children as victims, whether slaughtered in their schools or brainwashed and intimidated into becoming human bombs.
What they rely upon, above all else, is weakness among their targets. And in Russia, as President Putin has now admitted, there was weakness in spades. For despite all the brutality of his attempt to crack down on Chechen separatism, he was catastrophically weak where it really mattered — in realising the nature of the threat and securing his nation against it.
Only now does he understand that the global terrorism which Russia so cynically helped promote — by arming both Iraq and Iran, for example — threatens him too. Only now does he acknowledge that as a result of Russia’s endemic corruption and lawlessness, the country’s security is non-existent. And in such chaos, the bacillus of Islamic terrorism has taken root and grown.
But Russia’s weakness carries a dire warning for us, too. For the west is also weak, in its ignorance, prejudice and gullibility. Terrorism only became such a potent weapon of war because the west allowed it to happen. From the first plane hijacks in the sixties, the west showed weakness by refusing to confront the perpetrators and even rewarding them by paying attention to their purported grievances.
When the US was repeatedly attacked by Islamic terrorism throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it merely sat on its hands, made token responses, or decided to cut and run. Osama bin Laden concluded from this that the US was weak. We know this because he said so. And so he unleashed 9/11.
But instead of learning the correct lesson that the current horrors are the result of such a failure to act, the west has succumbed to historical amnesia over those previous attacks. It is convulsed instead by hysteria over the war on Iraq, with absurd conspiracy theories about Zionists and ‘neo-conservatives’ surfacing instead almost daily in the mainstream media and driving out rational debate.
And so the terrorists carefully calibrate their atrocities to exploit such weakness, confident that for every outrage it is not they but America which will be blamed. Those whipping up this hysteria, therefore, have blood on their hands.
As President Putin has said, ‘the weak are always beaten’. Unless the west wakes up from its trance and starts realising who are its true allies and who its true enemies, the scenes of anguish in Russia will be merely the prelude to an unthinkable defeat.
read soon
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