Evil's true name

We've been tip-toeing around the real nature of terrorism for far too long. The horror in Russia compels us to recognise the truth about this evil.

ENOUGH. Finally enough with the evasions and excuses -- the pretence that this had nothing to do with Islamism. No, the evil that turned a Russian school into a slaughterhouse is too great and too threatening for more such polite fictions.

Consider: the terrorists who seized the school in Beslan refused to give their 1100 hostages water -- not even children who after two days in stifling heat were unconscious from thirst.

Consider: one child, 10-year-old Stanislav Tsarakhov, said he'd seen a boy beg a terrorist for water, "but instead of giving him water he drove his bayonet through the boy's body".

Consider: when a teacher, Elza Viktorovna, pleaded for the terrorists to at least spare the children, she was asked, "Have you finished?", and when she nodded was shot dead.

Consider: when the terrorists exploded into their final orgy of bloodletting, they shot in the back many children who tried to flee.

Reporters described how one rescuer carried out a girl while trying frantically to keep her insides from spilling out of the hole blown in her back. They described, too, how one female terrorist wounded and then killed a father as he ran to the school to save his children.

Aveta Aylyarova, a grandmother, told how she tried to help children who made it to her house, and how a girl shot in the legs cried: "Help me, aunty, I'm dying."

And look now at the funerals -- like that of Sveta Aylyarova, just six, who was carried to her grave dressed in lace and with a pink teddy at her feet. "She was a beautiful, smart little girl," cried a relative, a man who could barely speak for grief.

We need to know the depravity of what was done in Beslan because we need to understand there is now moving in the world an ideology that spurs men to commit horrors beyond even our nightmares.

And we need to realise a movement that can plan and work such evil in Beslan knows no boundaries of any kind. What might such people be planning next, and where and with what weapons? Surely no one can be safe. No massacre is unimaginable.

But what have we seen in so much of the coverage of this carnage, in which more than 350 people were killed, nearly half of them children?

Once again we have seen toxic excuses and evasions of the kind the US had to endure after September 11, and that even we suffered after Bali.

First, there was the blaming of the devastated victims -- this time of Russia. What wickedness had Russia done, it was asked, to bring this on itself?

And then there was the pretence that these terrorists -- or, rather "rebels" or "militants" -- were not motivated at all by Islamism.

The European Union, typically, was very quick to treat Russia as the accused, demanding it explain "how the tragedy could have occurred", implying Russian soldiers were to blame.

The Council of Europe urged the world to gang up on Russia -- "to keep up the pressure for a resolution to the Chechen conflict" -- as if the child-murderers of Beslan were simply reacting to its undeniably harsh rule in Chechnya.

Much of the commentary, particularly from the Left, took up the same themes, just as the terrorists would have hoped. The terrorists were ritually deplored, of course, but it was the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who, perversely, was put on trial.

"Toll rises as Putin admits fatal errors," cried the front-page lead of Monday's Age -- which described the terrorists as simply "Chechen militants" and nowhere mentioned the words "Islamic" or "Muslim".

Putin "faces his own questions", intoned host Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report on Monday, calling the terrorists "Chechen rebels". Again, nowhere in his introduction or the moving report that followed was Islam mentioned.

Putin "now faces the most serious challenge of his presidency", declared SBS, which then had the Islamic Council of Victoria condemn Putin's actions in Chechnya.

It is astonishing how far some media outlets went to avoid even hinting that the terrorists were Muslim, let alone Islamist extremists.

On Monday, Channel 9's evening news showed a clip of one captured terrorist pleading for his life.

"I swear by Allah, I did not shoot. I swear by Allah, I did feel sorry for the children," he said in Russian. But Channel 9's English translation dropped all his references to Allah.

This was just a Chechen rebel, you see, not an Islamist terrorist. Russia to blame, Islamism not.

The trouble with that script starts with the fact that the Beslan hostages were being slaughtered even before Russian troops stormed the school.

Men and women had for days been hauled off by the terrorists into one classroom to be shot dead and flung from a window.

One man was shot in front of the children as a warning to shut up. Children were close to death from dehydration, while others were forced to drink urine to survive. And then the terrorists' bombs began to explode in the gym, crowded with women and children.

Don't blame the Russian soldiers for then rushing in to stop the massacre, losing a dozen of their own in their frantic attempts.

Nor is it at all clear yet that most of the terrorists were the "Chechen rebels" we've been told of so often.

Perhaps they will turn out to have been just that, even though the main Chechen rebel leader, the fugitive former Chechen "president" Aslan Maskhadov, denies it -- and even though many Chechens, given increasing autonomy by Putin, would rather be ruled by Russia than by such animals.

But there are also indications that at least some of the killers were not Chechen at all.

Russian officials have variously claimed -- without giving proof -- that the more than 30 terrorists who seized the Beslan school included 10 Arabs, as well as an African, Russian and Ossetian, and some Ingush, Chechens and Kazaks.

Journalists in Beslan have also said books in Arabic were later found in the ruins after the siege.

If true -- if -- this suggests the operation was by a group with far more on its mind than Chechen independence. Indeed, the one captured terrorist of Beslan, Nur-Pashi Kulayev, allegedly told interrogators his leader said the real aim was to "trigger a war throughout the Caucasus", far beyond tiny Chechnya.

And inside the school, according to 15-year-old hostage Yana Khayaba, a Muslim herself, "the terrorists talked to us about Islam and how Allah was the only one to kneel before".

Nor is it news that Islamist groups have sent fighters and money into the region.

Russia has long claimed al-Qaida has deep ties with the most lethal of the Chechen warlords, Shamil Basayev, who has become steadily more Islamist and more brutal, adopting the suicide attacks that are the hallmark of Muslim terrorists.

Chechnya, and neighbouring Russian lands, is now yet one more battlefield in the Islamist jihad that has killed so many civilians in so many countries -- from Australians in Bali to Masons in Turkey; from Nepalese cooks in Iraq, to Americans in offices in New York. And Muslims everywhere.

The fighters for this cause do not want simply independence for a scrap of Russia.

To call them "Chechen rebels", rather than Islamist terrorists, is to pretend they have limited demands that could be met. That they have a cause that has nothing to do with us.

No. Theirs is a corruption of Islam that demands the end of our civilisation, and of democracy in Muslim lands. Theirs is a bastard Islam that would rather kill than let live. That worships death, and licences the murder of children.

Too many of our commentators will not face this harsh fact. But a few moderate Muslims are, at last, speaking out against this fundamentalist threat to them, to their religion, and to the children of towns as far away as Beslan, or near.

"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims," wrote Abdulrahman al-Rasheed, head of the Al-Arabiya TV channel, on Saturday.

In a bitter column in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awset, he added: "Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture."

The editor of the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa, Ahmad Al-Jarallah, insisted Islamist extremism be fought by spreading democracy in Muslim countries such as Iraq, and defending it by force, with America's help: "Terrorism can be tackled only through war, and only the United States . . . is capable of handling such a war."

So let's be clear. The men and women who shot children in the back in Beslan were not "Chechen rebels", "Chechen militants" or, as SBS put it, a "pro-Chechen commando group".

They were terrorists undoubtedly, and Islamist almost certainly. Some may have been Chechen, too, but that is not what made them so evil, or what makes their cause so lethal, even to us.

"At some point, if our legislators do not come the the realization that Islam is not a religion but rather a terrorist organization and consequently begin to protect us from Islam, the citizens will have to take matters into their own hands."

And it's coming to it. Islam is indeed a terrorist organization, and is also a cult of death. Their "religion" is based on the utter destruction of all that do not worship Islam. They will not stop until we are all dead.

This "war on terrorism" will escalate until either worshippers of Islam or the entire rest of the world is dead. It is one or the other. There is no middle ground here, no gray area. One side dies, and the other side lives. Period.

That decision was not made by me, or by anybody else in the civilized world. It was made by the worshippers of Islam. They have declared war on every human being on the entire planet.

This fight is to the death.

"because they want the whole of islam to follow thier intepretation. look at how many interpretations of christianity there is. islam itself is fractured into groups which dont necesarily even like each other. while we might think they are all the same, not so long ago the iranians saw the taliban as dangerous and extremist. sunnis and shiites arent always buddies."

The evidence from this attack indicates that it is NOT one faction, but a collaboration of numerous factions, ALL ISLAMIC.

Name ONE faction of christianity that would do something even remotely like this.

I think you are looking at only a small snippet of the history of Islamic behavior. Bin Laden is only the latest of the "Islamic Warriors" who have tried over the centuries to enslave the world for Islam. While you are correct in the fact that Bin Laden is attempting to start a holy war, you are incorrect in stating that the remainder of Islam is not complicit in the action. If this were the sole action of Bin Laden, there would not be hundreds of mullahs calling for their followers to kill infidels. There would not be hundreds of madrassas where children are taught to hate and kill infidels. And there would not be hundreds of localized Muslim attacks on non-Muslims around the world.

The entire "religion" has been focused on conquering the world by force throughout it's history. There had been a lull in the major efforts to expand Islam because it's civilization and society faltered for hundreds of years. Now Islam finds itself 1000 years behind the rest of the world but with access to Western technology that allows for assymetrical warfare. Islam uses the fact that most of the world is a civil society to waylay non-Muslims. There can be no making excuses for Islam. Islam is evil.

Came to mind while reading your posts.

We need to end the foolish propaganda about the Religion of Peace.

Islam has declared and is carrying out a world wide war against everyone that's not Islamic.

Know thy enemy. You should try reading the Koran. You really should. I mean, YOU REALLY SHOULD. The full text is online. There are a lot of them available. Go to Google and type in Koran. Pick one. Here's one of them.

http://www.hti.umich.edu/k/koran/

"The European Union, typically, was very quick to treat Russia as the accused, demanding it explain "how the tragedy could have occurred", implying Russian soldiers were to blame."

Read that France. They sucked up to the Nazis and capitulated as soon as they could. Islam is the incarnation of National Solcialisim in this century.

Anyone who can dispute me on this has licence to try.

militant islam does not control the islamic world. there is a great power struggle over there, much of it behind the scenes. i also think moderate islamic voices dont make good news, so that another issue.

militant islam wants to overthrow the pro-western governments and it wants its moderates to support jihad. sure, many of them dont like the west, but may just dont care much. yoiu are assuming that arabs and muslims are somehow less apathetic than other humans.

listen, i dont give a flying ____ about islam or muslims. what i do want is to defeat terror and i see the extremists trying to push their religion a certain way. i think we need to fight our battles with this in mind.

we dont this to win, not to be nice or excuse them.

SORRY, TYPO...

listen, i dont give a flying ____ about islam or muslims. what i do want is to defeat terror and i see the extremists trying to push their religion a certain way. i think we need to fight our battles with this in mind.

we DO this to win, not to be nice or excuse them.

Militant Islam controls most of the Islamic world. Look at virtually every Islamic country and you will see that they cave in to the demands of militant Islam: Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, etc.

Moderate Islamic voices don't speak up because they are afraid of having their heads cut off. Thusly, they are controlled by militant Islam. They aren't apathetic, they are TERRORIZED.

"militant islam does not control the islamic world. there is a great power struggle over there, much of it behind the scenes. i also think moderate islamic voices dont make good news, so that another issue.

militant islam wants to overthrow the pro-western governments and it wants its moderates to support jihad. sure, many of them dont like the west, but may just dont care much. yoiu are assuming that arabs and muslims are somehow less apathetic than other humans."

I wont say anything about typos if you wont. It's still readable. ;-)

Militant Islam most certainly does control the islamic world. That is why muslims danced in the streets when the World Trade Center was bombed. They did that in THIS COUNTRY TOO, by the way.

NOT ONE muslim organization condemned the bombings. Now, some muslims are saying that they are upset that the terrorists did that to children. Read it carefully. They are not saying that because children were slaughtered, but because of what the world is saying in the aftermath of them slaughtering children.

It looks bad. That is, of course, because IT IS BAD. It is also what Islam is all about: the killing of infidels.

"I can't get angry yet, I am repulsed beyond words and sick to my stomach.
Those who post here and there about what should be done in Mecca are starting to not sound to extreme."

I'm beyond angry. I have answers to your questions, although some may not like them...

"What should we do????"

We should give Russia the plans to the neutron bomb.

"What should Putin be doing????? "

He should be deploying the neutron bomb.

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