Esquire magazine has an article in its current issue that is extraordinarily unpleasant and painful. It is a close-up look at what happened on the first day of school in the Russian town of Beslan almost two years ago; the anniversary is fast approaching as America prepares to send its own children back to school. The article documents the three day siege from interviews of survivors, many of whom were horribly injured and traumatized by the events of those horrible days. What struck me reading it was the unnecessary inhumanity of the Islamic terrorists. I have written before about the particular brutality and sadism that is celebrated by so many in the Islamic world; in particular, I have written about Samir Kuntar, a monster who is held up as “a beacon of light” by the Palestinian Authority and whose release is one of the reasons Hassan Nasrulluh seized two Israeli students last month.
The Islamists make much of their "love of death" while mocking our "love of life" yet there is a difference between Palestinians dancing in the streets to celebrate 9/11 and what transpired in Beslan.
The terrorists in Beslan were fully prepared to kill children, which is bad enough. Palestinian terrorists have targeted Israeli women and children for years; they count murdering children among their greatest victories, yet there was something worse in Beslan. They also deprived children, including infants and toddlers, from having water and food and they wouldn't allow their hostages to use the toilet facilities for long periods of time. What possible political purpose could such gratuitous and sadistic cruelty serve?
Yet there is something even more troubling about Beslan than the terrorists' wanton cruelty.
I have written before about man's tribal nature (here and here in particular). The key to America is that we have successfully enlarged our tribe to include anyone who accepts the ideas that define us (though one of the reasons for the current discomfort with immigration is the sense that the shared beliefs that make us Americans have been under attack from within our own elites as well as from the outside.) The nature of tribal affiliation is that one's powerful identification with the tribe leads to a "my country right or wrong" ethic. This is a very natural tendency. Most people tend to look for the most positive spin to events involving their own tribe and look for the most negative interpretations of the actions of their enemy tribes. One way to mitigate this tendency is to allow and encourage dissent. Western democracies tolerate a very high level of dissent which tends to temper their excesses, though popular opinion can certainly over-ride ethical considerations at times. When the dissent becomes strong enough and compelling enough, democracies change their rulers.
It often takes a national trauma to force the members of a tribe to question their leaders. A signature event in the evolution of dissent during the Vietnam War was the massacre of My Lai. Without getting into the details of that event, the fact is that the news of the atrocity caused many Americans to question their country. If the war was causing or evoking such un-American behavior, the war had to be repudiated. What kind of people would we be if we did not respond to My Lai with the revulsion it deserved?
After Beslan, there was some perfunctory condemnation of the terrorists, often accompanied by descriptions of extenuating circumstances. The Russian's ruthless suppression of Chechnyan aspirations was often trotted out as somehow mitigating the horror of Beslan.
There can be no mitigating circumstances for such horror. Any attempts to rationalize such behavior should be beneath contempt, yet the Muslim community world wide saw nothing in Beslan to make them question the belief structure (the interpretation of Islam promulgated by the Islamists) that could justify their tribe's behavior. The lack of willingness of one Muslim to criticize another member of his tribe, no matter how egregious their behavior, speaks volumes about the Muslim World.
It is clear that the use of children as weapons against their enemies is acceptable to a large portion of the Muslim World. At the very least, the use of children as weapons is less objectionable to the Muslim World than publicly renouncing other Muslims for using the weapon.
A couple apparently planned to use their baby as a prop to facilitate their plan to destroy a UK to US airplane over the Atlantic. Communities throughout the Muslim world celebrate the death of their children killing other's children. This is a seriously disordered community. What will it take to make the so-called Moderate Muslims question their own community's standards?
Many individual Muslims, I am certain, were horrified by Beslan and are horrified by terrorism, especially terror directed at other children and using Muslim children. Yet, if "my tribe right or wrong" precludes criticism of those acting in the name of Islam, that determines the default position of the Muslim World to be support of the worst excesses of Islamic terrorists. This sets them against everything that civilization stands for.
If Beslan did not snap Islam out of its fantasy based ecstatic terror, what will?
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