NYC Letter: Always The Unthinkable

If someone demands that you surrender your wallet or hazard your life, we all recognize this as a criminal act. If say, Episcopalians felt enjoined by scriptural license to do so -- and did so in great numbers while the rest of the confession tongue clucked and the local constabulary shrugged, reminding us that Episcoplainism is a recognized religion afterall, not a criminal enterprise -- well, we would soon understand to look askance at Episcopalians.

Yet Islamites do far worse.

And, make no mistake, they do their evil as a religious calling. They believe themselves enjoined by Allah, who allows them everything as his agents. Scriptural interdicts are brushed aside for those doing Allah's work. But of course there is no divine enjoinment. Islamites have simply come to enjoy killing with a religious gloss.

Outside of terrorism, they are puny, powerless, and quarrelsome. Terrorism transforms them, much like the wife-beater who, come the end of a bad day, brightens at the prospect of beating the wife, strapping the kids, kicking the dog. Islamites enjoy great advantages because they are removed from decency, from humanity, while they fight an enemy that struggles with decency and humanity. And they flaunt the lucky hand they have dealt themselves.

Inbred hatreds are acted on freely. They are beholden to no one, not even their fellow terrorists, although terrorism affords many Islamites a respite from slitting the throats of lesser Islamites not quite up to snuff.

Where the unthinkable is such a huge tactical advantage, it is no surprise that Islamites have become specialists in the unthinkable.

The Western press usually characterizes Chechen terrorists as nationalist malcontents. They are that. They are also Islamites.

THE SCHOOL

June 2006 (Esquire) - On the first day of school in 2004, a Chechen terrorist group struck the Russian town of Beslan. Targeting children, they took more than eleven hundred hostages. The attack represented a horrifying innovation in human brutality. ...

The place was a horror. Each element of the siege—from the capture of the children to the enforced conditions of their captivity among the bombs to the murders of their fathers and teachers in the literature classroom to the explosions that ripped apart people by the score—had been a descent deeper into cruelty, violence, and near-paralyzing fear. Now they had reached the worst. Women stood at windows, screaming and waving white cloths. Bullets struck the walls. Dust and smoke hung in the air. Glass covered the floor, much of it splattered with blood. The room stunk of gunpowder, rotting food, and sweat. Terrorists raced through the haze, bearded, whooping, firing, and yelling instructions. Larisa had her son, Zaurbek, by the hand, and apprehended their new conditions; Madina had the two children she had brought from the weight room. She did not know their names. They rushed around a corner near the dish-washing room, where at least twenty other hostages were massed tight. Two girls were trying to squeeze themselves into a massive soup pot. Dead women and children were strewn on the kitchen tiles. The Kudziyeva family took a place on the floor. ...

Throughout Beslan and Vladikavkaz a fresh horror was descending. The morgue in Beslan was overflowing, and bodies were laid on the grass. Vladikavkaz's morgue also had a growing display of corpses waiting to be claimed. The dashes out of the school, and the rescues, had been so spontaneous and disorganized that many families were not sure whether their spouses and children had survived. The families also heard of blackened remains encased on the basketball court under the collapsed roof. The living roamed among the dead, peering at the unclaimed, looking for their own. ...

The Beslan siege claimed a greater toll of human life than all but one act of modern terrorism, the destruction of the World Trade Center. The terrorists' actions and the bungled rescue efforts ended with the deaths of 331 people, not counting the 31 terrorists the Russian government says were killed. Among the dead were 186 children and 10 members of Russia's Special Forces, whose individual acts of courage were undermined by the incompetence of their government's counterterrorism response. More than seven hundred other people were injured, most of them children.

[Hat tip: V de T]

Some advise negotiations. Some counsel understanding. Others claim there is another side to the story. And others still ask that we remember these beasts' humanity. Like Hitler, the Fuhrer who openly wept when his canary died.

They hate you. And they will kill you.

Follow your own counsels.