It's Islam, the killers are doing what they do in the name of Islam. And anyone that practices Islam that does not speak against this is for it.
Nothing more to it.
btttttttttttt
That's what I love about Mark Steyn. He does not "mince words." I have yet to find one of Steyn's columns with which I disagree. He is brilliant and gutsy!
Steyn is awesome.
What would Bush to if our school children were slaughtered?
What would kerry do?
More words for it are "terrorism" by "terrorists," not "war" or "guerillas" or "freedom fighters" or anything else.
complicit journalists
I'll get the whole thing posted in a minute. Steyn must NOT be exerpted, because the host may only carry it for a couple days!
It will be known as the "Massacre of Belsan"
Flee from whom? Let's take three representative responses: "Guerillas", said The New York Times. "Chechen separatists", ventured the BBC, eventually settling for "hostage-takers".
"Insurgents", said The Guardian's Isabel Hilton, hyper-rational to a fault: "Today's hostage-taking," she explained, "is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly . . . If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets – the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved – become targets because they are available."
And then there was Adam Nicolson in London's Daily Telegraph, who filed one of those ornately anguished columns full of elevated, overwritten allusions – each child was "a Pieta, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V" – and yet in a thousand words he's too busy honing his limpid imagery to confront the fact that this foul deed had perpetrators, never mind the identity of those perpetrators.
Sorry, it won't do. I remember a couple of days after September 11 writing in some column or other that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, that's still the difference. We can all get upset about dead children, but unless you're giving honest thought to what was responsible for the slaughter your tasteful elegies are no use. Nor are the hyper-rationalist theories about "asymmetrical warfare".
For one thing, Hilton is wrong: insurgent bullets can "penetrate military armour". A rabble with a few AKs and a couple of RPGs have managed to pick off a thousand men from the world's most powerful military machine and prompt 75 per cent of Hilton's colleagues in the Western media to declare Iraq a quagmire.
When your asymmetrical warfare strategy depends on gunning down schoolchildren, you're getting way more asymmetrical than you need to be. The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.
But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here. So the particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, The New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words Muslim or Islamist, for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities.
In the 1990s, while the world's leaders slept – or in Bill Clinton's case slept around – thousands of volunteers from across the globe passed through terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and were then dispatched to Indonesia, Kosovo, Sudan . . . and Chechnya. Wealthy Saudis – including members of the royal family – invested millions in setting up mosques and madrassas in what were traditionally spheres of a more accommodationist Islam, from the Balkans to South Asia, and successfully radicalised a generation of young Muslim men. It's the jihadist component – not the asymmetrical one, not the secessionist one – that accounts for the mound of undersized corpses, for the scale of the depravity.
If the Russian children are innocent, the Russian state is not. Its ham-fisted campaign in Chechnya is as brutal as it is ineffectual. The Muslims have a better case in Chechnya than they do in the West Bank, Kashmir or any of the other troublespots where the Islamic world rubs up against the infidels. But that said, as elsewhere, whatever the theoretical merits of the cause, it's been rotted from within by the Islamist psychosis.
I wonder if, as they killed those schoolchildren, they chanted "Allahu Akbar!" – as they did when they hacked the head of Nick Berg, and killed those 12 Nepalese workers, and blew up those Israeli diners in the Passover massacre.
The good news is that the carnage in Beslan was so shocking it prompted a brief appearance by that rare bird, the moderate Muslim. Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya Television, wrote a column in Asharq al-Awsat headlined, "The Painful Truth: All The World's Terrorists Are Muslims!" "Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," he wrote. This is true. But, as with Nicolson's prettified prose in London, the question remains: So what? What are you going to do about it? If you want your religion to be more than a diseased death cult, you're going to have to take a stand.
What happened in one Russian schoolhouse is an abomination that has to be defeated, not merely regretted. But the only guys with any kind of plan are the Bush administration. Last Thursday, the President committed himself yet again to wholesale reform of the Muslim world. This is a dysfunctional region that exports its toxins, to Beslan, Bali and beyond, and is wealthy enough to be able to continue doing so.
You can't turn Saudi Arabia and Yemen into New Hampshire or Sweden (according to taste), but if you could transform them into Singapore or Papua New Guinea or Belize or just about anything else you'd be making an immense improvement. It's a long shot, but, unlike Putin's plan to bomb them Islamists into submission or Chirac's reflexive inclination to buy them off, Bush is at least tackling the "root cause".
If you've got a better idea, let's hear it. Right now, his is the only plan on the table. The ideology and rationale that drove the child-killers in Beslan is the same as that motivating cells in Rome and Manchester and Seattle and Sydney. In this war, you can't hold the line against the next depravity.
Mark Steyn is a columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group and the Chicago Sun-Times.
If you've got a better idea, let's hear it. Right now, his is the only plan on the table.
Steyn Hits the nail on the head once again! Only GWB IS ADRESSING THE ROOTS OF TERROR!
Maybe Pat Buchanan spouting his ignorance and idiocy on this Sunday morning's talk show should read this marvelous article.
You know, I can't help but wonder about the masculinity of these Islamists we keep reading about.
They hide their faces and are afraid of "evil sexy" women, they like to rock back and forth waaay too much for my tastes, and they use the most innocent among us to protect themselves. They have too many rules to follow, including a whole list of rules with sub-texts of more rules for bodily functions!
They love to kill. They kill animals and play with the bodies for sport, they kill children with as much impunity as they would kill a goat or a stray dog.
They follow none of our rules of civility or even rules of combat. They remind me of filthy rodents that creep from dark sludge to sink their fangs into any warm blooded being that passes by too close.
They all need to be exterminated.
President Bush has a plan to change a diseased culture that exports death everywhere. He told us about it in his acceptance speech this past Thursday at the Convention. The question is, does his political opponent have a plan? Holding the line in this day and age, after Beslan, is not quite good enough. If there's ONE POSITIVE reason to re-elect President Bush, its to make this century the century of liberty.
"But the only guys with any kind of plan are the Bush administration."
Great article. BUMP!
Let's call it what it is, who the enemy is and why it's the enemy.
Moderate Muslims better start speaking up as their faith and beliefs are not being served by their silence. I found myself staring at a Muslim woman driving in traffic the other day. She had the window down and was enjoying the same beautiful Carolina day I was, but I was watching her as intently as I was watching where I was going.
And I hated the way I felt, like I should keep an eye on her, just in case she was some lunatic Islamist working on plans for some new 9/11 event. Now I have the thought of little kids being shot in the back. Innocent little kids being picked off as they ran away.
Terrorist: You won’t use my name will you?
Me: What do you mean?
Terrorist: How will you describe me?
Me: Ugly. Smells like a pig in heat. Too much hair. Small backbone.
Terrorist: No, no. I mean, what will you call me?
Me: Call you? You’re not my style. I will never call you.
Terrorist: No, no. How will you refer to me? Will you call me a freedom fighter?
Me: Are you for freedom?
Terrorist: No. Freedom is for the weak. Men must be ruled by Allah or be tortured and killed.
Me: Are you a fighter?
Terrorist: Yes. I will mutilate and destroy your women and children whenever I can.
Me: You would fight women and children?
Terrorist: No. Women are scary. They can be very mean. I will blow them up when they are not looking. Or shoot them in the back.
Me: No, I will not call you a freedom fighter.
Terrorist: How about militant. Will you refer to me as a militant?
Me: Are you in the military? Do you wear a uniform?
Terrorist: No. No. If terrorists wore uniforms we would be shot on sight. Even by women and children. Maybe even by each other. Being a terrorist is a very tricky thing.
Me: No, I will not refer to you as a militant.
Terrorist: Armed militant then.
Me: Why?
Terrorist: We are not so different. We have arms and legs and toes. Referring to me as an armed militant makes me appear more human.
Me: No.
Terrorist: How about insurgent? You could call me an insurgent.
Me: What government are you revolting against?
Terrorist: All of them. All governments are against chaos. Infidels have taken over all governments.
Me: What about the Arab nations?
Terrorist: Praised be Allah. He has given the faithful many blessings. Many acres of rock and desert to call our own. In some places, there are even trees. We have used these lands to build a great civilization.
Me: What are the accomplishments of your civilization?
Terrorist: We are great killers of the infidels. And have many fine recipes for scorpion.
Me: No. I will not refer to you as an insurgent.
Terrorist: How about guerrilla? You could call me a guerrilla.
Me: No. Guerrillas, though they are animals, like you, have a certain dignity. They are somewhat man-like. It would be too much of an insult to those fine creatures.
Terrorist: How then will you refer to me?
Me: I will call you a terrorist. A murderer. Human filth.
Terrorist: How dare you! I am not a republican.
Me: Can you wind surf?
Hmm, nice words Isabel. Too bad that by writing them you reveal that you have no soul. Here's the deal old girl, you can't rationalize terrorism. You can't just come up with a nice, pat explanation and then feel all safe and comfy. They will kill you as fast as they will kill me. The thing is, I want to do something about it. I don't want me, or any of my countrymen, or any of the decent people on this planet dead, just because you can't face the truth.
Cowards need to get out of the way and let those who are willing to fight this horror do what they must.
By the way old girl, how do you manage to keep your rotting, stinking carcass alive without a soul?
But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.
So the particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, The New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words Muslim or Islamist, for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities.
Steyn makes some magnificent points.
However, I wouldn't allow the IRA and ETA etc. off the hook so easily. Enniskillen, the Madrid bombings - no minor acts of terror in their own right.