Melanie Philips: A War Unlike Any Other (An honest-to-God MUST READ!)

Suddenly, a far-away country about which most of us know little has shot to the very forefront of our minds and consciences. In a new century already steeped in horror, what happened at the Russian school in Beslan plumbs new depths of barbarity.

The carefully planned slaughter of hundreds of children, a massacre of innocents mown down inside their school by zealots who bayoneted one when he asked for water and who blew others up or shot them in cold blood, is a monstrosity which has had a profound effect upon those who watched in horror as the tragedy unfolded.

The hellish images — of murder, of screaming terror, of naked and starving children forced to eat the flowers they had brought to school or drink their own urine — will surely serve to define our terrorised age. It is impossible to comprehend how human beings can behave like this to anyone, let alone to children.

And that incomprehension makes us realise that we are dealing here with something that is as terrifying as it is diabolical — people who no longer behave as recognisable human beings, who are in the grip of a religious hysteria so profound that human life is of no consequence whatsoever, except as a means to terrorise the world.

For I do not believe this was an isolated episode in a fight between Chechen separatists and the Russian government. This was Russia’s 9/11, part of the global jihad being waged against all infidels — Americans, Europeans, Russians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or moderate Muslims — in order to re-establish the medieval Islamic global empire. It was, in short, further evidence that we are embroiled in a world war.

Apologies for the 3 posts in a row...shoulda made one but that's how my brain works half the time ... the half of the time it DOES work.

Explanation for the Borg rock is :http://www.crystalinks.com/blackstone.html

Nobody seems to have a clue other than it's OLD and everybody named in the Bible AND the Quran made out with it at some time in their life! (??!!?)It isn't worshipped. It's simply that all those dudes like Abraham did handle it and oh ya kissed it a lot for some reason. Probable explanation for that was it was the only thing in their lives withOUT camel breath!

OK. Sorry. That was NOT PC and highly irreverent. A thousand apologies (grovel & scrape)

DAVE632 calls The Socialist Republic of Canuckistan home for the moment. I'm just outside the center of the known Galaxy - Toronto. I lost a wife (of 21 yrs) to a cerebral aneurysm 3 years ago and have just married a girl (lady) from Arizona so as soon as the US INS classifies me as a minimum security risk I'll be taking my company and heading down into the heart of the FREEREPUBLIC. "Yeehaaaw" and all that.

Sheesh! Don't any of you guys watch Star Trek?

Star Trek: The Next Generation is the source of the term Borg cube.

The Borg are a people with a collective mind. They run around the galaxy, in spaceships shaped like cubes, destroying other sentient species. The ships are huge, ugly (the Borg have no aesthetic sensitivity), and extremely powerful.

The individuals are expendable; only the collective matters. They get the individuals from the species that they conquer. Their favorite saying is, "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

Their goal is to assimilate every other species in the galaxy.

The Kaaba (meaning "House of Allah") is an ancient cube shaped stone building inside the main mosque in Mecca. It is 50 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 45 feet high. It predates Islam, though it may have been rebuilt since.

Set in a corner of the building is the Kaaba Stone, which also predates Islam. It was supposed to have been given to Adam after his expulsion from Eden by the angel Gabriel. It is about eight inches in diameter and believed to be an iron/nickle meterorite. It is set in a large silver ring. It is believed by Muslims to have been originally white, but supposedly has turned black from absorbing the sins of pilgrims.

Every muslim must make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca to walk seven times counterclockwise around the Kaaba and touch the Kaaba Stone and kiss it.

See post #71 for my suggestion as to what to do with it.

My apologies to DAVE632. It's obvious from your post that you get the Borg reference.

Melanie Philips:

...But Russia’s weakness carries a dire warning for us, too. For the west is also weak, in its ignorance, prejudice and gullibility. Terrorism only became such a potent weapon of war because the west allowed it to happen. From the first plane hijacks in the sixties, the west showed weakness by refusing to confront the perpetrators and even rewarding them by paying attention to their purported grievances.
When the US was repeatedly attacked by Islamic terrorism throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it merely sat on its hands, made token responses, or decided to cut and run. Osama bin Laden concluded from this that the US was weak. We know this because he said so. And so he unleashed 9/11.
But instead of learning the correct lesson that the current horrors are the result of such a failure to act, the west has succumbed to historical amnesia over those previous attacks. It is convulsed instead by hysteria over the war on Iraq, with absurd conspiracy theories about Zionists and ‘neo-conservatives’ surfacing instead almost daily in the mainstream media and driving out rational debate.
And so the terrorists carefully calibrate their atrocities to exploit such weakness, confident that for every outrage it is not they but America which will be blamed. Those whipping up this hysteria, therefore, have blood on their hands.
As President Putin has said, ‘the weak are always beaten’. Unless the west wakes up from its trance and starts realising who are its true allies and who its true enemies, the scenes of anguish in Russia will be merely the prelude to an unthinkable defeat.

Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of good stuff that is worthy attention. I keep separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson, Lee Harris, David Warren, Orson Scott Card. You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about).

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/ September 6, 2004

Blood on their hands

Classic example of appeasenik idiocy and moral vacuity by Max Hastings, writing in the Guardian about the Beslan massacre. Having observed that terrorism is getting nastier, he opines that the last thing that should be done is to use force against it. Those who do are guilty of 'savagery' and 'vengeance'. The idea that such actions might be designed to stop the terror is not entertained. Indeed, Hastings tells us breathlessly that the real purpose of terror is to produce a reaction from the victims that will recruit yet more to the cause. You don't say!
So what should folks who are being fried in bus bombs or whose children are slaughtered in schoolrooms do instead? Why, 'undramatic, even invisible means: intelligence, politics, diplomacy, special forces operations '. Uh huh. Like those aren't used already? And what happens when they fail to persuade the terrorists to pack up their bomb belts and go home? Hastings says force never works. But where in the world has his approach ever worked?
A little detail like that is, of course, irrelevant. For Hastings, killing terrorists is the equivalent of Nazi tactics or war crimes. And of course, Israel is branded accordingly for attempting to protect its citizens. This is described as 'venting its spleen for suicide bombings upon the Palestinian people'. As for President Bush, he 'indulges both Ariel Sharon and Putin in any means they see fit, to suppress those who use terrorist methods, without heed to the need for diverse political responses, as well as sensitive military tactics'.
Now, Putin's brutal repression of the Chechen revolt hasn't been clever at all, not least because Russia has long been supplying money and arms to the very people who promote the Islamic jihad -- of which, as Putin now realises far too late, the Chechen resistance is the North Caucasus branch office. Not that Hastings grasps this -- indeed, he expliclty rejects the obvious fact that Palestinian, Chechen or al Qaeda terror are part of the same phenomenon.
But his remarks about Israel are as spiteful as they are ignorant. He suggests that Israel has never attempted any political resolution of its conflict with the Palestinians -- thus totally ignoring the fact that the current intifada was their response to a political process in which Israel was offering them a state of their own. What hate-filled malevolence is this, that can so distort and misrepresent an issue, and make criminals out of the victims of a death cult of annihilatory totalitarianism?
The fact is, as I wrote in my article for the Daily Mail today, the single greatest incentive for acts of terrorist mass murder is the response of those who blame the terrorised rather than the terrorist, respond to every act of mass murder by signalling yet greater weakness, demoralisation and fear, and make it worth the terrorists' while to ratchet up the violence. It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west's response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. Hastings concludes that terrorism is winning. Very true -- but only when it results in attitudes like his own

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