Moscow and Maalot
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Following the horrific massacre at Middle School No. 1 in Beslan, Russia, by Muslim Chechen separatists, there came a notable outpouring of sympathy from the Arab and Muslim worlds. “Muslim leaders condemn killers,” read a headline in the Guardian. “Expressions of shame and self-reproach swept the Arab world Saturday as Muslims mourned the deaths of Russian schoolchildren,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “From Egypt to Lebanon and Kuwait to Jordan, Muslim and Arab leaders on Friday expressed shock and outrage at the siege that ended with the death of an estimated 200 people,” read a dispatch from Al Jazeera.
The Syrian-puppet president of Lebanon, Emile Lahud, sent a cable to President Putin. “Lebanon denounces all forms of terror, especially that which threatens the lives of children and innocents,” Mr. Lahud wrote. According to Al Jazeera, the Kuwaiti prime minister, Sabah al-Ahmad Al Sabah, expressed his “great regret for the victims of this terrorist operation,” which he said “goes against all human values and threatens the lives of innocent civilians.” The top Muslim cleric in Egypt, Grand Sheik Muhammad Sayid Tantawi, condemned the school siege as a “criminal act” during a sermon in Banha, a city north of Cairo.
The general manager of Al-Arabiya television, Abdulrahman al-Rashed, headlined his daily column in Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper “The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!” Wrote he: “Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture. Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims.” He went through a list of recent terror attacks by Arab groups in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
Somehow Israel didn’t make the list, though the Jewish State is a place where Arab terrorists have been murdering children in the name of Islam for years, including in recent days. Nor is the targeting of a school new. Yasser Arafat’s killers struck at one school, Maalot High School in Israel, as far back as 1974. So forgive us if we take with a grain of salt the self-criticism that the atrocity in Beslan has prompted throughout the Arab world.
