has this crossed your minds? guess not!

The North Ossetia Peace Process
by Steven Plaut
Sep 06, '04 / 20 Elul 5764


As all the horrific details come out about the Islamofascist massacre of children in Beslan, Russia, a number of thoughts come to mind.

1. Throughout the reporting of the massacre, not a single news medium I read or heard spent time lecturing the listeners about how this carnage must prove how just the Chechen terrorists' cause is, else why would they be so "desperate".

2. No news media talking heads nor op-ed writers hectored readers by demanding that the Russians now address the underlying causes of the anger at them on the part of the terrorists.

3. Michael Lerner did not devote a piece in Tikkun magazine to the need to feel the pain of the Chechen murderers.

4. Chechnya, in fact, has a far more legitimate claim to independence from Russia than the Palestinians have for any form of "self-determination". The Chechens are not seeking the destruction of Russia, while the Palestinians are seeking the annihilation of Israel. The Chechens are non-Russian Moslems, culturally and linguistically alien to Russia. The "Palestinians" are members of Syrian and Lebanese families who migrated into the land of Israel starting in the late 19th century. Moreover, unlike the Palestinians, the Chechens do not have 22 other Chechen states they can choose from or to which they can move.

Having noted all this, let us also note that the massacre of children by the Chechen neo-Nazis probably put an end altogether to the willingness of anyone in the world to reconsider independence for Chechnya. The Chechens forfeited any legitimate claims they might have had to independence. Contrast this with the world's reaction to Palestinian barbarism, which has murdered 1,500 Israelis, many of them children, just since the signing of the eternal Oslo peace accords foreswearing violence.

5. At least four of the Chechen terrorists were captured alive and summarily executed by the Russians. No bleeding hearts nor do-gooders screamed in moral indignation that Russia violated the Miranda rights of those terrorists. No one demanded the terrorists be given expensive lawyers and allowed to have their cases heard by civil courts, in contrast with the movement on behalf of the Guantanamo Bay terrorists. No one from the Israeli Labor Party proposed granting the terrorists the Kremlin and half of Moscow.

6. Nazis have always made a point of especially targeting children. The German Nazis went out of their way to murder Jewish children. The Palestinian neo-Nazis make special efforts to target Israeli children. The Chechen neo-Nazis learned from the Palestinians.

7. The news services continue to call the murderers "militants", for the simple reason that calling them terrorists would force the news people to call Palestinian murderers terrorists and that might upset the Arabs. It is essential for the networks to call Palestinian murderers of Jewish children "militants", for this is how the news services signal their "neutrality" in the Middle East conflict between murdering Palestinians and innocent Jewish victims. It is also their subtle way of signaling how justified they see the Palestinian murderers, similar to their practice of counting the number of dead Palestinian terrorists and suicide bombers in any death toll from any atrocity. (Will the dead Chechens and their Arab sidekicks be counted by the BBC and CNN in the final Beslan body count?) So witness the extent to which the news services will go to maintain their Orwellian support for Palestinian terrorism. Evidently, the only act of savagery the BBC is willing to denounce as "terror" is when the IRA activists planted a bomb at the BBC headquarters in London.

8. Not a single Russian leftist raced to Beslan to demonstrate his or her solidarity with the terrorists.

Not a single Russian leftist professor wrote an op-ed justifying the kidnapping and murders.

Not a single Russian leftist poet composed a poem celebrating the suffering of the terrorists, and poems written by Chechen pro-terror poets are not being introduced into the Russian school curriculum.

Russian leftist professors are not organizing an international boycott of Beslan and Ossetia colleges in solidarity with the terrorists, while demanding that the Beslan taxpayers continue to subsidize them.

9. Russian newspapers are not united in expressing understanding for the struggle of the Chechen terrorists. They are not lecturing readers about how there are no military solutions to the problems of terrorism. They are not demanding goodwill gestures from the Kremlin so that the Chechen terrorists will feel their self-esteem is no longer threatened.

10. But the most important thought I am sure you shared with me as the story of the massacre unfolded was this: Why has not Israel rounded up the ISM (International Solidarity Movement) squad of cheerleaders for terrorism and shipped them off forthwith to defend the homes of the family members of the dead Chechen terrorists from the enraged Russian troops that will be entering Chechnya?