<$BlogRSDUrl$>

My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2004-09-06

Beslan Massacre, pt. II

On Friday night I posted reactions to the massacre in Beslan, Russia, in which more than 150 children were killed. Inspired by this article of Mark Steyn's (courtesy Powerline), I have chosen to expand on my thoughts.

The central idea: 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.

This is now a different sort of problem. As atrocious as the attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Bali nightclub were, the deaths of children in those events could--in a wildly warped world--be conceived as "collateral damage." Beslan is different.

Children were the target, the tool, and the central theme of this event. And that moves the ball into a different court. Terrorism is now the problem of Islam.

Until and unless the broader Islamic community feels, expresses, and acts on the outrage that they SHOULD be feeling at this, then the broader Islamic community holds no moral authority or worth to express much of anything else.

Let me say this differently: Islamicist terrorism is a manifestation of a brand of Islam that only Islam itself can rein in. Until Islam acts to do so, it is complicit in the use of terror.

So you can hold on to your superior indignation about the "encroachment on the civil liberties" of Muslims in America. The Muslim community enjoys liberties and respect unprecedented in the rest of the world (including the middle east--right, ladies?) here in America, and for our troubles they whine about being looked at differently when they refuse to condemn the acts of others who share their heritage.

Step up, Imams. It's time to come to the plate and take a stand. Your "brothers" are guilty of crimes against humanity, and unless you condemn them and assist in the apprehension of them, you are accomplices.
Posted by: Michael / 9/06/2004 11:04:00 AM

Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?