I've been avoiding this post all day. I'm saddened by the whole of it. The pictures have been beyond heartbreaking. While I am no lover of Russia, I feel an incredible compassion for the Russians right now. The end of this standoff was a human disaster.
The lovely Mrs. Jib and I discussed this topic this evening. It seemed to be affecting her a bit more than I expected. She put this tragedy on par with 9-11. Now I know that the casuality numbers do not compare, but her point was a good one. She said that in the case of 9-11, everything was over comparatively quickly. Some never felt pain nor fear, their death was instantaneous. For others, there was fear and pain, but their was misery was mercifully over in less than two hours. In this case, the hostages were held for three days in miserable conditions. There was a high number of children involved. Death seemed an inevitability, and time dragged on and on. Many, many people walked away from this with torturous memories of seeing people killed, maimed. A lot of children are going to have to learn how to cope with their experience, and even then, they will carry very horrible, very graphic memories around for the rest of their lives.
I don't want to get preachy with this post, so all I'm going to say is that civilized world is going to have to take the blindfold off and see reality for what it is: Islamist terrorists do not value life, they worship murder and death, and they don't care if you are for or against anything. They do not rule you, and therefore they want to destroy you. The sooner the rest of the world wakes up to this, the quicker this threat can be disposed of.
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I agree with Mrs. Jib. Maybe because I am a woman, but I don't think so. I think it is because of the recognition that this level of fanaticism has no limitations. The Chechen terrorists, having failed in targeting the Moscow theatre decided that Russian children were more vulnerable targets. They were perfectly willing, even hoping, the children would die of dehydration. It was part of their plan from the start. When the children started to escape after an accidental bombing that seems to have gone off when Security forces who were allowed by the terrorists to remove bodies outside the gym set off a mine, the terrorists shot the children in the back The children were the targets more than the adults.
It's recognition that this kind of hatred, this level of insanity, would not stop, nor hesitate over poisoning water supplies nor using nuclear materials to widen the carnage. It isn't the numbers that count, it is the intent. For all the damage, the 9/11 attack was aimed at adults and adult structures where few children would be expected. The Chechen terrorists have chosen new, softer targets. A school and children and their parents.
They are not unique even in this century. Terrorists in Columbia wage war against civilians daily. The media calls them guerillas. They've killed nearly 80,000, mostly civilians. The Shining Path in Peru do the same, mostly against families. The pizza parlor bombing in Israel by Palestinian terrorists targetted families. Palestinian bombs, too, like the Chechen handmade bombs include nails and other metal designed to maximize wounds, except the Palestinians go one further. They add rat poison so that most wounds become easily infected. For every person who dies, two are horribly maimed.
And in all of this, the media, our own and international media, stoke the hate and help legitimize the tactic of targeting civilians by not calling it terrorism, a newspeak of obfuscation designed to prevent concerted moral outrage. To do so, they would have to equally condemn the 9/11 attacks as well as the Palestinian attacks and the Chechen murders as terrorism. The fact that they don't is collusion.
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