Just One More Front in the War On Terror

I haven't spent any time on here discussing the god-awful massacre in Beslan, Russia, where Chechen and Arab terrorists murdered over 300 people, most of them children, in a school. The story's probably gotten a bit lost between the end of the GOP Convention, Hurricane Frances and Bill Clinton's heart surgery. But reading some of the accounts of what happened makes you realize just how depraved these people are...

While despairing soldiers and rescue workers moved among the growing pile of body bags, it was revealed that an 18-month-old baby had been repeatedly stabbed by a black-clad terrorist who had run out of ammunition.

Other survivors told how screaming teenage girls were dragged into rooms adjoining the gymnasium where they were being held and raped by their Chechen captors who chillingly made a video film of their appalling exploits.

They said children were forced to drink their own urine and eat the petals off the flowers they had brought their teachers after nearly three days without food or water in the stifling hot gym.

Their stories came as Russian officials warned that the final death toll of the siege of Middle School No 1 at Beslan in North Ossetia - in which up to 1,200 people were held captive - was likely to be more than 400.

The official toll yesterday stood at 323 which included 156 children, 10 Russian soldiers and two emergency service workers - 35 of the hostage-takers were also killed. Last night 434 people were being treated in hospital with 247 children and 85 adults in a critical condition.

A Russian official said six seriously injured children had been taken to Moscow for treatment. "One of them is a child, just 18 months old, with many knife wounds," he said.

The Chechen terrorists - including two so-called "Black Widows" - had been meticulously planning the hostage-taking for months.

High explosives and ammunition had been smuggled into the building during the summer by rebels disguised as workmen.

...A "Black Widow" is thought to have blown herself up in front of more than 1,000 hostages, prompting the deadly fire-fight and triggering a further serious of explosions inside the gymnasium.

At least three rebels were thought to have been captured alive in the school's basement - but were later said to have died.

One disguised herself as a teacher leading children to safety. She was apparently shot dead seconds before trying to blow herself up in a nearby hospital. Another was apparently shot dead and beheaded by his comrades for trying to surrender.

I left out some of the first-person accounts, but they're beyond sickening. This massacre exceeds the terrible events at Columbine; Klebold and Harris were sick monsters, but the terrorists at Beslan are in another league of depravity. Imagine making a mother choose which child she would save. Perhaps there is a God, since this woman's daughter survived. Yahoo has a seies of pictures up, which include shots of the memorials and the wounded. (Hat tip: Allahpundit, who has perhaps the most heart-rending picture up on his website.)

What's chilling, of course, is that the terrorists will probably try this in other places. What's even more sickening is the tendency of some of the folks on our side to try and rationalize this sort of depravity. Mark Steyn offers the answer to the pathetic masters of moral equivalence...

PHOTOGRAPHED from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it's only when you peer closer that you realise that that's because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They're children. Row upon row of dead children, more than a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.

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.

...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.

For those who have forgotten that here is a War on Terror, this should be serve as a reminder, since Russia is just another front. Sadly, many folks will ignore the warning.