Posted on 09/07/2004 8:45:33 PM PDT by naturalman1975
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."
They understand this war -- but we surely won't if we keep misnaming our enemy.
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.
now weve decided whose fault it is, remind me again how bombing mecca would further our cause?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-chechnya7sep07,1,2978208.story?coll=la-home-headlines
they already kidnapped some chechen leaders families apparently. dont mess with the russians.
Yeah but I wish there was a way to not kill more babies and kids in a retaliation.
Thou art John Kerry. I'm sure I'd be thrilled with Kerry's bold and swift response to a similar attack on a U.S. school. And that would include explaining why, exactly, we had it coming and negotiating with the French.
"Yeah but I wish there was a way to not kill more babies and kids in a retaliation."
There is that. We have to remember that we aren't like them. Reducing ourselves to their level would be giving them a gift. That is why I suggested that we let the Russians do it. ;-)
If Islam as a religion allows such murderous extremists to lay claim to a place within that religion then every Muslim is complicit in any terrorists acts done under the banner of Allah.
No one wants a war with Islam. But if the religous leaders of that religion do not put an end, one way or another, to the radical factions within itself, then we (the rest of the world)will. Those Muslims who are complicit with the Islamic terrorists by their silence will be caught in the fire with their brothers in the faith.
Americans can be bloodthirsty also...take note of our own civil war.
Islam needs such a war to define itself.
BTTT
"ENOUGH. Finally enough with the evasions and excuses -- the pretence that this had nothing to do with Islamism."
Expect we'll be hearing this more and more, from coherent people.
Islam seeks to be the dominant organizing institution of the world. Hiding behind the false label of "religion."
For every person killed by muslims, 1,000 muslims should be killed. With that ratio, they might consider reforming.
"Americans can be bloodthirsty also...take note of our own civil war. "
Um... I don't think that Americans are particularly bloodthirsty, nor do I think that our civil war is evidence of such. Our civil war was fought because the north believed that they had the right to cram unconstitutional federal authority down the throats of the states and the Southern states called BS on it.
And a lot of people died.
We're not bloodthirsty, we just don't take any crap.
Just wanted to say that I agree with everything else that you said.
Trying to draw parallels between what was a factious split in our Republic and what I hope is a split in Islam.
For better or worse, our own "War of Northern Agression", defined what direction this country would take from that point on.
In the process, more Americans died in that War then in all other U.S. Wars...combined.
Islam needs to define it's direction...in perhaps the same way we did. But for that to happen, there must be strong disagreement within Islam on religous principals, and Muslims with courage to take arms against the evil in their Church. I don't know that such is the case. We shall see.
Er...
The Civil War was fought because the South saw the writing on the wall vis-a-vis slavery. They were just peachy-keen with Federal Authority when it was preotecting their property rights.
States Rights is the mantra on the Neoconfederate mythos. Ever single sessesionist state SPECIFICALLY mentioned the threat to slavery as the cause of their discontent in their articles of seperation.
Anyhooo...that was a long time ago...we is all one happy family now.
The correct example of our Jacksonian tendencies (more accurate than "Bloodthirsty") would be the defeat of Nipponese facism.
ping
Christian Identity would do this to Jews or Blacks if they could.
"Christian Identity would do this to Jews or Blacks if they could."
Really? They would if they could? They would invade a Jewish or Black school, strip hundreds of little children to their underwear, starve them, withold water for three days, and then shoot them and throw the bodies out the windows? Really? They'd do that?
Tell you what: go to Christian Identity (whoever they are) and tell them what kinds of horrors you think that they are capable of. Let me know what they say.
That's right. They are VERY small, probably less than 50,000 altogether. The best of them are petty thugs with delusions of grandeur.
However, IIRC, there was a story about possible connections to the Murrah (OKC) bombing, so they shouldn't be discounted entirely.
I don't recall saying anything that indicated that I know anything about these folks, in fact I said the opposite.
From what you have said, they have 50,000 members, are heavily armed, and have been in existence for at least 10 years. In that time they have committed several murders while committing robberies. They are essentially bullies and thugs with delusions of grandeur. They have not committed crimes against humanity, nor are they likely to do so.
Compared to the Islamic psychopaths running around, these folks sound like girlie men.
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