09-09-2004, 09:47 PM
Evil's true name
By ANDREW BOLT
08sep04
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 b@st@rd
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.
Sources:
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/printpage...0699560,00.html
http://www.utro.ru/gallery.shtml?20040908ntv,5,7,,53
____________________________________
By ANDREW BOLT
08sep04
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 b@st@rd
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.
Sources:
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/printpage...0699560,00.html
http://www.utro.ru/gallery.shtml?20040908ntv,5,7,,53
____________________________________