Author: Ralph Peters
Publication: New York Post
Date: September 4, 2004
URL: http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/28066.htm
The mass murder of children revolts
the human psyche. Herod sending his henchmen to massacre the infants of
Bethlehem haunts the Gospels. Nothing in our time was crueler than what
the Germans did to children during the Holocaust. Slaughtering the innocents
violates a universal human taboo.
Or a nearly universal one. Those
Muslims who preach Jihad against the West decided years ago that killing
Jewish or Christian children is not only acceptable, but pleasing to their
god when done by "martyrs."
It isn't politically correct to
say this, of course. We're supposed to pretend that Islam is a "religion
of peace." All right, then: It's time for Muslims to stand up for the once-
noble, nearly lost traditions of their faith and condemn what Arab and
Chechen terrorists and blasphemers did in the Russian town of Beslan.
If Muslim religious leaders around
the world will not publicly condemn the taking of children as hostages
and their subsequent slaughter - if those "men of faith" will not issue
a condemnation without reservations or caveats - then no one need pretend
any longer that all religions are equally sound and moral.
Islam has been a great and humane
faith in the past. Now far too many of its adherents condone, actively
or passively, the mass murder of school kids. Instead of condemnations
of the Muslim "Jihadis" responsible for butchering more than 200 women
and children in cold blood, we will hear spiteful counter-accusations about
imaginary atrocities supposedly committed by Western militaries.
Well, the cold fact is that Western
soldiers, whether Americans, Brits, Russians or Israelis, do not take hundreds
of children hostage, then shoot them in cold blood while detonating bombs
in their midst. The Muslim world can lie to itself, but we need lie no
longer.
The tragedy in southern Russia occurred
thousands of miles from the United States, but, in essence, that massacre
happened next door. The parents, teachers and students kept for days without
water or food in a sweltering school building before being butchered were
our children, our sisters, our wives, our parents.
The mass hostage situation wasn't
about Chechen rebels (and at least 10 Arabs) opposing the Russian government.
It was a continuation of the universal struggle between good and evil.
And there is no doubt which side is evil, scorned though the word may be
by our own elite.
How can any human being with a shred
of conscience dismiss what occurred in that school as anything less than
evil?
The attack in Beslan wasn't about
Russia's brutal incompetence in Chechnya - as counter-productive as Moscow's
grim heavy-handedness may have been. It was about religious bigotry so
profound that the believer can hold a gun to a child's head, pull the trigger
and term the act "divine justice."
We will hear complaints that the
Russian special forces should have waited - even after the terrorists began
shooting children. Negotiations are the heroin of Westerners addicted to
self-delusion. Who among us would have waited when he or she saw fleeing
children cut down by automatic weapons? The urge to protect children is
as primal as any impulse we ever feel.
Make no mistake: No blame attaches
to the Russians for the massacre at that school. The guilt is entirely
upon the Islamic extremists who have led the religion they claim to cherish
into the realms of nightmare.
There will be repercussions. Having
suffered the hijacking and destruction of two passenger jets, a deadly
bombing at a Moscow subway station and a massacre in a primary school all
in less than two weeks, the Kremlin will have learned to rue the day it
imagined that there was anything to gain by opposing American efforts against
terrorists, whether Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.
As they inevitably do, the terrorists
reminded the world of their heartless barbarism. Even if France manages
to beg the release of its kidnapped journalists in Iraq, it has begun to
sense its vulnerability. And all Europeans with a vestige of sense will
recognize that the school seizure in Russia could easily repeat itself
in Languedoc or Umbria, Bavaria or Kent.
An attack on children is an attack
on all of humanity.
No matter what differences Western
states discover to divide them, the terrorists will bring us together in
the end. Their atrocities expose all wishful thinking for what it is.
A final thought: Did any of those
protesters who came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50 million
Muslims stay an extra day to protest the massacre in Russia? Of course
not.
The protesters no more care for
dead Russian children than they care for dead Kurds or for the hundreds
of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein executed. Or for the ongoing
Arab-Muslim slaughter of blacks in Sudan. Nothing's a crime to those protesters
unless the deed was committed by America.
The butchery in Russia was a crime
against humanity. In every respect. Was any war ever more necessary or
just than the War on Terror?
And what will terror's apologists
say when the killers come for their own children?
Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond
Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."
