Power Line: Where is the Outrage?

September 04, 2004

Where is the Outrage?

The mass murder of school children and their parents in Beslan raises once again the question: where are the "moderate" Muslims? In this morning's New York Post, Ralph Peters forcefully raises the question of what we are to conclude about the nature of Islam:

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.

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."

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.

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?

Please let us know if you are aware of any instances of Muslim leaders condemning the mass murders in Beslan, or, for that matter, any of the terrorist outrages in Russia. I've seen nothing. I can find nothing about Beslan, for example, on the website of Council on American-Islamic Relations.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that if, as is so often said, Islam has been "hijacked," then its leaders must have been like the American airlines prior to September 11: under orders not to resist.

UPDATE: A number of readers have written to point out instances where Muslim leaders, including the senior Muslim cleric in Chechnya, have condemned the Beslan atrocity. Instances are compiled here and here. That's good, and maybe it's a start. But if most Muslims are "moderates," and if they really do want to take back their religion, they will have to do a lot more than issue condolences and condemnations when their co-religionists commit mass murder.

Posted by John at 08:15 AM |

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