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.
Sorry - double post - computer indicated it hadn't worked the first time
"The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough."
-Bede Jarrett, The House of Gold
BTTT...Excellent post. Thank you!
This article is outrageous! It mentions Islam! /sarcasm off
just a point: putin won power mainly because he promised to deal with the chechen problem. thats why they are blaming him. if you promise something you had better deliver.
and islam is a major factor in these events, especially in justifying the actions to the perpetrators ('we are doing gods will!', kind of thing) but it isnt the only cause. you cant pretend that the chechan situation isnt a big factor in this attack.
i see articles which want to go 'its all islams fault', but they are as wrong as the articles that say it isnt islams fault. islam is the connection between most of the worlds terrorism (i saw some list the other day of the last few years world terrorism and maybe 3/4 was islamic) and isnt so much the cause, as the catalyst.
Ping for later...
When I stop crying.
These Islamic beasts never intended to let any of their hostages live. It was a suicide/murder mission from the get go.
Great article. Thanks!
Excellent piece. Tells it like it is.
I agree with your assessment that most of the world is trying to be "politically correct" by not mentioning the words "terrorist" and Islam. But I think that another large part of the reason for not using such labels is that people are rightly afraid of offending Muslims because they know the kinds of reactions that will follow
I disagree with your opinion that these "Islamists" have bastardized a religion. The root of the problem is Islam itself. All of Islam tolerates such behavior, much of Islam supports terrorism and many imams call for Muslims to murder infidels. These are the facts based on reality, not based on the public relations people for Islam. Ten percent of Muslims identify themselves as Islamists. That is over 150 million Islamists. These people are the "military" for all of Islam to use in foring Islam on the entire world. The one billion plus other Muslims are quite content to let the 10% get blamed for murders and other atrocities. The 10% are spreading Islam through fear, scaring non-Muslims into silence lest they be the next victim, while the 90% who support them are living among us, happy that Islam has sunk it's cancerous roots into Western civilization.
This instance of Islamic terror in Russia has been called "Russia's 9-11" by many different news services. You are quite right that there are several things at play with Chechen terror. The reason that this is very different from 9-11 is that Chechens are part of Russia.
This would be like, in the U. S., the state of Florida wanting to cecede from the Union and sending terrorists to blow up schools and children in Georgia. We know that this would not ever happen because we are a civilized people. However, Muslims are, for the most part, barbarians living 1000+ years behind the rest of mankind. So they will deploy all sorts of barbaric tactics to achieve the end they desire. Is is not Islam's fault that the Chechens are seeking independance but it is Islam's fault for the methods they use.
"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."
I disagree with this completely. This is not a "corruption of Islam", nor is it a "bastard Islam."
What these scum did IS Islam! They do not consider us to be a "civilisation", nor do they believe that they murdered "children". They killed infidels. That's all. They killed a bunch of infidels in the name of Allah. That is what they are supposed to do.
THAT IS ISLAM.
Amen to that!!!
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.
Why isn't Putin doing anything?
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.
What should we do???? What should Putin be doing?????
We don't need the details of the crime repeated in every other thread I for one am beyond sick of the images and would like to here what the hell is being done in defense of the babies that we're slaughtered!
Gee where is the Left on their Human Rights rant about this??!!!
exactly. islam isnt the cause as such, but its extremist form is used to justify all sorts of acts and is the catalyst for the move to terror. islam isnt the cause, its the reason for the extremism of the action.
but this is the thing: by allowing the terrorists (if there really were arab connections) to take over, or moving to terror (and i know the chechens are no strangers to this...) they have basically removed the right of complaint by average chechens, who (apparently) arent as whole heartedly behind the war with russia as you might think. theres no doubt russia has treated chechnya pretty harshly and theres been a lot of civilian deaths there to drive anger.
the terrorists have removed any possible route for peace between chechnya and the rest of russia. thats their stated goal, though. they want war. the fact is that the majority of muslims in the world are not hoping for war. its the minority that keep trying to goad the west, and now russia, into wars. bin laden has stated that he wants to see a holy war with the west, and terrorism is a wedge between then peoples. the further he can get the quiet muslims from the west, the more they only have him and his followers to turn to. basically, our enemy wants us to be the satan to unite their people.
see?
bombing mecca? we might as well start bombing ourselves. if you want every muslim on the face fo the earth to be dedicated to our destruction then that would be fantastic. apparently we havent got enough trying to kill us already!
I suspect that many of that 90% are upset with the murderers from their ranks who are spoiling the plan to win against non-muslims by means of the war going on in the bedrooms of our world, including the USA. I really feel that that is the war that is more threatening to us.
I assume that you get the drift. Jim
you are almost right. the terrorists use these teachings to convert anger into action. by saying it is the will of god, they are able to do inhuman things. by just giving up and saying ALL of islam is like this, you are giving the terrorists a victory.
why?
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. saying ALL of islam doesnt even begin to comprehend the complexity of the situation -and as i said it helps the terrorists who are desperately driving for:
a) more converts; and
b) a jihad with the non-muslim world.
this is their two-pronged attack, and driving a wedge between the west and moderate muslims is exactly how this is done. you think moderate chcen voices stand ANY chance of being heard now? the russians will listen to NOTHING. one step closer to the war the captured guy stated they wanted AND those moderates are now further from those they would want peace with than ever. in fact the only people close to them now... well its the terrorists i guess.
see how that works? the terrorists dont just hate our freedom or something, they have a plan. there IS a plot and there is a far greater danger than many here realise because they want to lump ALL muslims together. this is exactly what our enemy wants us to do.
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