Checens hold hundreds of Russians hostage today

[LRB]

Any way you slice it "reap what you sow" is rationalizing to at least some degree what those terrorist bastards did. The only good terrorist is a dead terrorist. And there is no such thing as a justified terrorist.

If the Russians did any thing wrong then they should be judged for what they alledgedly did. However it was 100% filthy terrorists who committed this heinous act and who are 100% responsible and bear 100% of the blame.

"Reap what you sow" when applied to this incident with Russian school children is a lame ass excuse to avoid full accountability by the terrorists.

[mavsman]

Try for once to look through different glasses. If you were Chechnyan, how do those kids that have been murdered today differ from those much more Chechnyan kids that have been murdered by Russian soldiers? If you'd live there, would you still be able to call the latter "collateral damage" and the former "victims of a terrorist crime"?

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: mavsman
Try for once to look through different glasses. If you were Chechnyan, how do those kids that have been murdered today differ from those much more Chechnyan kids that have been murdered by Russian soldiers? If you'd live there, would you still be able to call the latter "collateral damage" and the former "victims of a terrorist crime"?

Re: looking through different glasses, would you, as a Chechnyan, go out and abuse, torture and murder innocent children as a means of addressing political grievances? The ideology immediately becomes "terror for terrorism's sake" rather than any politically justifiable cause.

As for the Arabs, .......

[LRB]

Originally posted by: mavsman
Try for once to look through different glasses. If you were Chechnyan, how do those kids that have been murdered today differ from those much more Chechnyan kids that have been murdered by Russian soldiers? If you'd live there, would you still be able to call the latter "collateral damage" and the former "victims of a terrorist crime"?

So are you saying that the Checens deserved to have their children killed because they reap what they so????

If Russians target and kill innocent Checen children that is wrong, no ifs and or buts. They should be held accountable and punished for it. But that punishment should not involve harming other innocents.

Remember I'm American. Those filthy bastard terrorist from Al Queda killed 1000's of innocents including some children on 9/11/2000. However that in no ways justify's targeting and killing innocent children even if their parents are members of Al Queda.

If I lived in Chesna I might call the killing of Checen children unjust, but I would never justify killing of Russian children because of what some Russians did to my countrymen. This argument, reap what you sow, has zero logic.

[mavsman]

Mavskiki, of course I wouldn't, but that doen't mean that I can't understand that other people, as one can witness on this board, tend to use harsher means. What I wanted to say is that small countries/regions can't match bigger adversaries man by man, because they are being outnumbered. So they have to specialize, attack weak targets, etc. It doesn't justify anything they are doing, but whatever the bigger opponent might have done or might do isn't justified either. And just because our media is labeling one side as "terrorists" and the others as "...'s army" doesn't make it justifiable.

[LRB]

Originally posted by: mavsman
Mavskiki, of course I wouldn't, but that doen't mean that I can't understand that other people, as one can witness on this board, tend to use harsher means. What I wanted to say is that small countries/regions can't match bigger adversaries man by man, because they are being outnumbered. So they have to specialize, attack weak targets, etc. It doesn't justify anything they are doing, but whatever the bigger opponent might have done or might do isn't justified either. And just because our media is labeling one side as "terrorists" and the others as "...'s army" doesn't make it justifiable.

Army fighting armed people is much different that targeting innocent children. Accidentally hitting children is much different than targeting them.

[mavsman]

LRB, that's exactly what I mean, you know it and I do. But unfortunately, there are lots of people, regardless of their point of origin, that scream "vendetta" whenever something like Chechnya or 9/11 happens. We both know that it's wrong, because that vendetta will always hit more innocent people than guilty ones, but some never learn.

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: mavsman
Mavskiki, of course I wouldn't, but that doen't mean that I can't understand that other people, as one can witness on this board, tend to use harsher means. What I wanted to say is that small countries/regions can't match bigger adversaries man by man, because they are being outnumbered. So they have to specialize, attack weak targets, etc. It doesn't justify anything they are doing, but whatever the bigger opponent might have done or might do isn't justified either.

Then, respectfully, Mavsman, I'm missing your point.

And just because our media is labeling one side as "terrorists" and the others as "...'s army" doesn't make it justifiable.

For all its faults, I don't believe The Media is responsible for any confusion between terrorists and armies. For one thing, the purpose of armies generally tends to be engaging other armies. I have to think that the terrorists expected to find children and not soldiers when they 'occupied' a middle school.

[mavsman]

Damn, I'm being outspeeded. Mavskiki, I know what you mean, but you have to understand what those people felt when they saw that the Russian army made no difference at all when they were shooting and bombing anything that moved. I keep repeating myself, but it isn't all black and white and those small suppressed nations don't have the military power to react in a "honorable" way, hence the cheap shots.

[knowitall]

LRB, I know in my heart that you're close to understanding. I can tell you from experience. Throw out logic,laws,right and wrong, and climb into the mud. You have to get dirty to find out the truth.

God Bless their souls

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: mavsman
Was directed at your former reply. Your last is BS. Having your child killed results in your child being dead. No matter if it was a terrorist or an invading army. Try to think as a parent (because this terror is by a large amount fueled by angry, grieving dudes), not as a soldier.

Again, I disagree. It's a quesiton of intent. I daresay no American soldier went into Iraq with the objective of killing a child.

I daresay that the terrorists occupying the school didn't give a damn (at best), and at worst intended to kill far more.

You can try to 'relate' to the terrorists' mentality or 'point of view' all you want, but to my mind, it comes down to trying to relate to cold-blooded murder. I'm just not complicated enough to need to relate to the mind of someone who would set out to intentionally murder hundreds of young children.

[mavsman]

[Again, I disagree. It's a quesiton of intent. I daresay no American soldier went into Iraq with the objective of killing a child.

No, it isn't. It's a question of result. Would you - as a parent - be happy, if some foreign soldier killed your child, but afterwards said: "Sorry, was a mishap!" Of course you wouldn't. Even more so, if you thought that the invasion of that foreign army was unjust. That's what motivates those people.

[knowitall]

Your comparison of this situation in Russia to that of an American soldier in Iraq is uninformed and regrettable. I mean no disrespect.

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: knowitall
Your comparison of this situation in Russia to that of an American soldier in Iraq is uninformed and regrettable. I mean no disrespect.

It was a metafur. Git outta my face.

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: mavsman

No, it isn't. It's a question of result. Would you - as a parent - be happy, if some foreign soldier killed your child, but afterwards said: "Sorry, was a mishap!" Of course you wouldn't. Even more so, if you thought that the invasion of that foreign army was unjust. That's what motivates those people.

There we have our difference of opinion. I can see accepting an accident or an unintended result without the desire for vengeance. You apparently do not.

What I don't see is rationalizing the purest type of cold-blooded murder.

[knowitall]

And I would laugh if this topic was funny.

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: knowitall
And I would laugh if this topic was funny.

And if the topic were funny, I'd slap your fool head off for emitting a meaningless vacuous line of flatulent non-contributory anti-content.

[knowitall]

An accident or unintended result? What you don't know about oppression is alot.

[twelli]

I think this discussion goes nowhere. Nothing happens for no reason. I think MavDog isn't wrong saying that the terrorist do something because the victims (not the children, but the country they live in) has done something before or is still doing something. You can make that statement correctly anytime and anywhere. But if, and I say if, MavDog uses this to justify the acts by the terrorists, he deserves to be treated like someone sympathizing with terrorists.

I think more important than looking at this single act of terror is to try and understand why Islamic terrorists increasingly cooperate together worldwide. Why now? What is their master plan? Which country is next? How can we break their network? How can we target their supporters? And of course, we have to ask ourselves as well, are we doing anything wrong that makes the problem worse? Hunting down the terrorist scum is the right way to deal with the terrorists. Trying to solve problems peacefully in troubled regions is the right way to deal with the ordinary people who might sympathize with terrorists.

[mavsman]

There we have our difference of opinion. I can see accepting an accident or an unintended result without the desire for vengeance. You apparently do not.
What I don't see is rationalizing the purest type of cold-blooded murder.

Our difference of opinion is not that big. I oppose vengeance at least as much as you do, it's just that I don't think of anything Russia did to Chechnya as an accident or an unintended result. Everything they did was in cold blood and with a purpose, but other that that we agree. Ain't this a cool forum?

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: knowitall
An accident or unintended result? What you don't know about oppression is alot.

And with George Bush as President, by God, it will stay that way.

[knowitall]

How selfish kiki. Here's one thing you can understand.........BOMBS AWAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

[MavKikiNYC]

That's a good thing to be clear on.

[dude1394]

Well if murdering a bunch of children is ok because it's asymetrical warfare, then I guess a nuke on chechnya would be an acceptable form of asymetrical warfare on the russian side.

[Epitome22]

I fully defend Chechen citizens right to feel angry at Russia but there's just no excuse for this. They just tied their own noose and are about to hang themselves with it. NO ONE, will sympathise with them now. The thought of what Russia is going to do to them makes me wince.

[kg_veteran]

WHEN THE KILLERS COME FOR THE KIDS

BY RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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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?

Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."

[Chiwas]

I was going to quote many parts that made sense to me, many good messages that we all should know, analyize or comprehend.

However I found this part that made me change my intention:

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.

This became another partisan article, just in the "final thought". A massacre, a tragedy, an outrage against the humanity, was converted in an attack at the protesters. This is not valid in my conscience.

[dude1394]

You are making an assumption chiwas that peters is trying to say that the protestors are anti-republican and therefore they should be ashamed. What he (and many other liberals have posited) is where are the protestors for these type of atrocities. Peters is just sickened by it and the protestors who claim to be so incensed by killing seem to have selective memory to him.

Mavdog (or epitome, I can't remember which) would say that these protestors do not represent democrats or republicans. Now obviously I don't agree with that, but many of the protestors DO not claim party affiliations (unless they are socialist/communist) so his words showing their hypocrisy seems accurate.

Peters is hardly a partisan, he's been very,very tough on bush's policies in the past. Over the top in THIS partisans mind, but he writes from the heart.

[LRB]

Originally posted by: Chiwas
I was going to quote many parts that made sense to me, many good messages that we all should know, analyize or comprehend.

However I found this part that made me change my intention:

This became another partisan article, just in the "final thought". A massacre, a tragedy, an outrage against the humanity, was converted in an attack at the protesters. This is not valid in my conscience.

Why is it partisan calling out these protesters who "claim" to abhor violence and the deaths of innocents who don't so much as give lip service to condemning the murder of 100's of innocent school children. It seems that it's not violence that these protesters have a problem with but rather America.

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: MavKikiNYC
Maj. Gen. Valery A. Andreyev, the director of North Ossetia's branch of the Federal Security Service, said that half of the dead fighters were foreigners, apparently from Arabic countries. If verified, that would comport with the Kremlin's assertions that Chechnya's rebels were receiving aid and manpower from abroad.


How long will the rest of Europe stand idly by?

This was not what I had in mind.


Russia angered by EU request
Sat 4 September, 2004 19:23


MOSCOW/VALKENBURG, Netherlands (Reuters) - Russia has denounced as "blasphemous" a request by the European Union's Dutch presidency for an explanation for the bloody end to a mass hostage seizure at a school by Chechen gunmen.

But Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot, who made the request in a statement on Friday on behalf of the EU presidency, said on Saturday he had been misunderstood and he would try to calm the row by talking to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

"There obviously was a misunderstanding," Bot told a news conference after a meeting of EU foreign ministers in the Netherlands. "My words have been misinterpreted. I never said that I needed to be ... informed."

More than 320 people, almost half of them children, were found dead after troops stormed a school on Friday in the southern Russian town of Beslan, where Chechen separatists had held more than 1,000 hostages for 53 hours.

In a statement issued in the name of the EU presidency on Friday, Bot said all countries should work together to stop such tragedies, adding: "We also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

The Russian Foreign Ministry reacted with outrage to Bot's statement, and Interfax news agency said the Dutch ambassador had been summoned to the ministry to explain.

"Mr Bot's elaborations are an absolute contrast with the wide international support and solidarity with Russia in these tragic days," a ministry statement said.

"Inappropriate statements by the Dutch minister look odious ... and blasphemous," it said. "We expect explanations from the Dutch side."

Bot said had only sought more information from Moscow and had not intended to criticise.

"I will certainly set the record straight with my colleague Lavrov later in the day," he said.

"In the context of the fact that we are dealing with a global scourge ... it would be very useful if there was more intensive cooperation between all countries in the world, both in the preliminary stage when we are trying to prevent such things and in the aftermath, because we can all learn from each other," he said.

At Valkenburg in the Netherlands, where the EU ministers were meeting, Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds told reporters she understood the Russian reaction and Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen said it would be "a very premature and wrong judgment" to fault the Russian security forces.

But diplomats said former Soviet republic Latvia had pressed the EU at the meeting to react more strongly to the Russian handling of the siege.

[mavsman]

Interesting read for those who want to know how f'ed up the situation in that part of the world really is:

Europe's darkest corner


Europe's darkest corner

Yesterday's rigged election in Chechnya demonstrates the bankruptcy of Russian policy in the region

Thomas de Waal
Monday August 30, 2004
The Guardian

Eight years ago in Grozny, at the end of the first war in Chechnya, I met a man who called himself a sharia judge. He was an ex-footballer turned rebel fighter, one of the men who had come down from the mountains and thrown the Russians out. The twentysomething judge's grasp of Islam seemed about as poor as mine as he chatted flirtatiously with my female colleague and smoked incessantly. His "sharia court" had done virtually nothing.
The ex-footballer embodied all the confusions of a conflict that is still not properly understood. On the surface an Islamic radical, he was a Chechen nationalist who had picked up Islam like a lucky charm amid the ruins left behind by the Russian army.

Things have changed in Chechnya since then. I thought of the sharia judge last week on hearing of the plane explosions in Russia, which were probably the work of Islamic Chechen extremists or their allies. During the past two years, terrorism associated with Chechnya has killed several hundred Russian and Chechen civilians.

Five years ago, when Moscow launched an "anti-terrorist operation" to recapture Chechnya, there was no real terrorism there. Now, thanks mainly to Moscow's policies, it is becoming a real threat.

From a distance, the war in Chechnya has acquired a dark aura of inevitability: an implacable Islamic warrior people fighting an invading Russian army. But the Chechens are far from being Afghans. They are a small mountain people with a history of resistance to the Russian state, but also of pragmatic accommodation with it. Most speak Russian much better than they do Chechen, and almost all have relatives working in the rest of Russia.

Moreover, most Chechens I know are viscerally opposed to the Islamic fundamentalism that has slowly been infiltrating their republic during the past 10 years. If they are Muslim, they are Sufis practising a form of local Islam that is all but incomprehensible to Arab incomers. For years, the Chechens sent away these interlopers with curses when they were told to stop visiting their local shrines or to start veiling their women.

The Arab zealots have kept on coming, though in much smaller numbers than the Russians claim. There are ties with the Middle East that didn't exist before. And there are Chechens whose lives have been so broken by bombings, abductions and "filtration camps" that they are ready to be suicide bombers.

The tragedy of Chechnya is that most Chechens are fed up with the zealots, but have nowhere else to turn. They would almost certainly give up the hope of independence for a peaceful existence in the Russian state - if only the Russians would guarantee them basic rights.

A villager in Paul Mitchell's recent film on Chechnya for BBC4 says of Moscow's second military intervention in 1999: "If the Russians had been just a little civilised and decent to the ordinary working man, then the people would have welcomed them with open arms. But so many innocent people have been tortured and killed. Everybody knows that hundreds of people just disappear. Where are they?"

Now, Chechens are governed by two vicious and criminal armed groups. Russian soldiers earn money from extra pay and black market oil trading, and have every incentive to stay, treating the Chechen population as a target for extortion and intimidation.The second group, the Kadyrovtsy, are Chechens loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, son of the late pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov. Kadyrov, 27, whose Balkan equivalents ended up in the courts of The Hague, uses thousands of armed men to maintain his economic and political power.

These venal agents of violence make Moscow's "war on terror" unwinnable. Corruption is so rife that in June the rebels were able to bribe their way past a dozen checkpoints and attack police stations in the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia, 100 miles from the "combat zone".

Yesterday, the Kadyrovtsy's man was elected president of Chechnya in a rigged poll. Alu Alkhanov had no real opposition and not many votes.

The official Russian position is more or less as follows: Chechnya is a front in the international war on terror and our policies there deserve unreserved western support; however, it is a domestic political issue and no international organisations can be involved. The situation is getting back to normal; but it is still too dangerous for journalists or human rights workers to be given free access.

The western position is equally short-sighted. It is to wish that Chechnya goes away, mildly condemn human rights abuses, express sympathy for Russia's problem with terrorism and pray that the extremists do not attack a western target next.

It will not go away. The extremists have nothing to lose. Almost everything has been tried except a broad-based political process not manipulated by Moscow, and a genuine international presence by the UN or the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor what is going on. This darkest corner of Europe desperately needs some light.

· Thomas de Waal is Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting

[dude1394]

Mark Steyn on the tragedy in chechnya.

Here is Mark Steyn on the mass murder in Beslan, Russia.

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.

Mark's article goes on in talking about Dubya having the only plan on the table for dealing with the rotting islamic problem.

If you've got a better idea, let's hear it. Right now, his is the only plan on the table. The ideology and rationale that drove the child-killers in Beslan is the same as that motivating cells in Rome and Manchester and Seattle and Sydney. In this war, you can't hold the line against the next depravity.

[Chiwas]

Originally posted by: LRB

Why is it partisan calling out these protesters who "claim" to abhor violence and the deaths of innocents who don't so much as give lip service to condemning the murder of 100's of innocent school children. It seems that it's not violence that these protesters have a problem with but rather America.

It is partisan -and very bad taste- to use a tragedy that has nothing to do with the protesters, for making a charge on them.

[Mavdog]

Defeat of the terrorists is helped by other muslims not allowing their ideology to hijack a religion.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Russian School Takeover Stirs Self-Criticism Among Arabs
By Megan K. Stack Times Staff Writer
September 5, 2004

CAIRO — Expressions of shame and self-reproach swept the Arab world Saturday as Muslims mourned the deaths of Russian schoolchildren — and voiced unusually critical condemnations of the social ills widely blamed here for breeding terrorism.

The Arab world has watched with mounting disgust in recent weeks as a wave of civilian hostages — some of them Arabs and Muslims — were slaughtered by masked insurgents in Iraq. Last week, newspapers and satellite channels were dominated by pictures of bloodied, naked children in southern Russia fleeing armed guerrillas suspected to be Islamic rebels. Many Arabs found themselves in an ever-more-common dilemma: struggling to reconcile their sympathy for a political cause with growing revulsion at the wrath leveled by self-described "holy warriors" against the innocent.

"What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?" Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, Egypt's highest-ranking cleric, railed during Friday prayers in the Egyptian town of Benha. "You are taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims."

Tantawi's refrain was a familiar one among Muslims who have felt unfairly tarred by the swell of high-profile bloodbaths carried out by fellow believers: This wasn't Islam.

But on Saturday, some prominent Arabs came forward with a more sobering interpretation: Corrupt, repressed Arab and Islamic societies have become breeding grounds for terrorism. It's a judgment often heard among Western critics but rarely voiced in heavily censored Arab rhetoric.

"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims," wrote Abdul Rahman Rashed, general manager of the popular Al Arabiya television channel. In a blunt column in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al Awsat, Rashed listed attacks carried out by Muslims in Iraq, Russia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

"Our terrorist sons are an end product of our corrupted culture," he wrote. "The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us."

The guerrillas who seized the school in the town of Beslan on Wednesday and held more than 1,000 captives were believed to have been linked to Islamic separatists in the Russian republic of Chechnya.

In the aftermath of Friday's shootout between troops and the hostage-takers, which left more than 300 people dead, Russian officials told reporters that 10 of the more than two dozen fighters were Arabs, though the statement could not be immediately verified.

Chechnya has long figured prominently among the battles listed by radical Islamists as jihads, or holy struggles. Like Palestinians, Iraqis and Kashmiris, the predominantly Muslim Chechens are generally viewed sympathetically by the Arab world, and their plight is often pointed to as proof that Islam has come under fire around the world.

Iran and virtually all Arab governments put aside any Chechen sympathies and condemned the hostage-taking and ensuing carnage in Beslan. Such broad outrage has been rare after assaults in Iraq or Saudi Arabia and all but unthinkable after attacks on Israeli civilians.

King Abdullah II of Jordan, who was visiting Putin in Russia last week, called the school takeover "criminal and cowardly."

The Saudi daily Arab News blasted Putin as "a servant of state dictatorship and control," a man who could not afford to lose his "tough-man image." But the editorial saved its harshest condemnation for the guerrillas, "who had put themselves in a position where no one would shed tears when the punishment came. They reached a new low when they chose toddlers as bargaining chips."

"The world sympathized with them. But no one believed that those deaths [of Chechens] in a war situation gave them the right to do what they did in Beslan," the editorial said. "If the Chechens had set out deliberately to shame and defeat a noble cause — and there is no cause nobler than that of freedom — they could not have done any better."

An editorial in Lebanon's Daily Star called for "better governance systems and socioeconomic opportunities in those countries and regions, including our Middle East, that seem to generate so many terrorists."

"Terror emanates largely from despair, hopelessness and humiliation," the editorial said. "And these are sentiments whose causes can be identified, tracked, grasped and addressed."

[dude1394]

Wonderful to see "some in" muslim society waking up and decrying terrorists. Sad to read the Saudi Daily replaying the decade long playbook that it's someone else's fault. Like the people in Iraq who are risking their lives try and scratch out a democracy against similar animals, these will be the first patriots of a new muslim culture. (I hope)...

[dude1394]

Good for Israel. They certainly know more than most what battling islamic terrorism means.

JERUSALEM -- Russia's foreign minister welcomed Israel's offer of help in combating militant groups on Monday, saying Russia needs to be more effective in fighting terror after last week's deadly hostage school standoff.

While showing willingness to work with Israel against militants, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said any counter-terrorism alliance would have to include Arab countries -- in a nod to Russia's traditional allies in the region.

"We appreciate the very strong readiness of the Israeli people to help Russia at this hour and this will certainly strengthen the counterterrorist coalition these days," Lavrov said.

"We certainly are taking into account the need to be more effective," he told reporters during a visit to President Moshe Katsav.

In a meeting with Israeli opposition leader Shimon Peres, Lavrov said terrorism is one of the biggest challenges facing the international community.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a telephone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, proposed expanded intelligence coordination between the two countries.

[MavKikiNYC]

Child survivors recount that:

1) Arab gunmen drove up to the school shouting Allah Akhbar.

2) The terrorists refused to give the children water, jeered at them and told them to drink their own urine.

3) The terrorists killed children, parents and teachers in front of other children.