Posted on 09/06/2004 3:44:27 PM PDT by gopwinsin04
Russia on Sunday buried some of the victims of the hostage crisis in Beslan with three more children succumbing to injuries taking the toll in the school to 333 as parents and relatives continued to search for the 260 missing.
Reports quoting morgue officials said the toll in the bloddy drama in the Belsan city climbed to at least 394.
In a parallel development, North Ossetia's Interior Minister Kazbek Dzantiyev resigned accepting the responsibility for flaws in security leading to the school siege.
President Vladimir Putin has declared days of national nourning for Monday and Tuesday, when most of the terror victims will be buried.
Flags will be flown at half mast and all entertainment programming will be cancelled throught the country.
Parents and relatives of 260 hostages in the Beslan school are still unable to trace their dear ones.
In all there were 1,184 hostages inside the school.
Four hundred and forty eight are still in hospital of which 69 are still in critical condition, official spokesperson for the North Ossetan administration Lev Dzugayev said.
(Excerpt) Read more at indolink.com ...
The Orthodox believe the soul of the departed stays near Earth for 40 days after death. (I'm not sure why -- to comfort those remaining? haunt those responsible? take care of unfinished business?) They have a funeral (traditionally open-casket and very emotional) -- then 40 days later they have a party, as the SOUL leaves Earth and goes home to Heaven. It is a lovely thought...
This is a good religion, comfort in time of loss. And you're right the 40 days will come in handy for in-depth planning.
I love it because it says so much.
To have the faith of a little child, the most precious in the eyes of The Lord.
That is heart wrenching.
40 days - the number of days Jesus walked the earth after His death and before His Ascension into Heaven.
RIP
RIP
For those of you who have seen (or own the DVD) version of the Two Towers, there is a particulart scene, titled "Where is the Horse and the Rider?"
Theoden, King of Rohan, has fully awaken from the lies and "peace overtures" of the evil Saruman, in time to watch the forces of Isengard exterminating the women and children of Rohan. He asks his aide, Hama - and himself - "How did it come to this?" And Peter Jackson, in a masterful and cruel trick of cinematography, pans to the arming of the young boys of Rohan, as they receive their axes, helmets and spears in shock, and in terror, and finally an acceptance so stoic that it shames even the few grown men left to defend Rohan.
It came to this because we waited and hoped for so long that we could somehow deal with evil in some other way.
And the blood of these childeren is on the hands of everyone in the West who refused to see who our enemy is, and who votes to pursue A More Sensitive War.
I'm glad the "polytheist" media is reporting this. I had a hard time finding this today on CNN and Fox News TV.
The death toll is staggering, and will only get worse.
I agree MOgirl, there aren't many time I am speechless either.
When reading about the senseless deaths I get infuriated.
Sunday at Church I stood up and told the whole congregation that these muslim extremists must be defeated, I told in some detail of the pictures I have seen and the heart breaking stories I have read.
In Church I asked them all to Pray for the families and for the re election of President Bush.
The only way they will be defeated is to get Bush back in, take the fight to the enemy.
If not, this very situation could be at one of our schools.
Mix politics and religion? Yes I do every day of my life on Gods green earth.
This is a religious war, we need to call it what it is.
And neither will they at the Great White Throne of Judgement.
Every knee shall bend and acknowledge that Christ is Lord.
They were incinerated. There are many people we lost on 9/11 whose remains were never identified.
The only thing we know in either case is that some people have disappeared, and they had been expected to be in a location where the worst thing happened.
He is missed.
Probably was taken down by Putin.
Hard to imagine man could do something more horrendous to fellow man than 9/11.
You have a wonderful home page, as well.
New York Times has a great OP-Ed on this
CULT OF DEATH
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/
We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.
We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.
We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.
This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.
But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.
It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.
We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.
Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.
The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.
The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."
It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.
Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.
Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?
They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."
This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.
Speak for yourself, NYT. In fact, you're one of the primary reasons many Americans are having difficulty identifying the threat.
Others of us know damn well where the rage is appropriately directed.
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