The Massacre of Innocents

September 4, 2004 — 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?

From a NY Times Article

BY RALPH PETERS

Ralph Peters is the author of “Beyond Terror:

Strategy in a Changing World.”