Here I am, holding my newborn, while sub-human thugs in Russia are killing children. I can’t really say anything printable about this specific atrocity. So instead, I’ll quote the simply perfect, dead-on comments of Ralph Peters’ NY Post article (my more temperate comments follow):

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.

He goes on to say that “Islam has been a great and humane faith in the past.” Fair enough; but I think it’s fair to ask whether its periods of humanity and peace were the aberrations, or its periods of bloodthirsty and violently aggressive expansionism, with radical elements like Al-Qaeda spewing forth pure evil into the world? Modernity, with its obsessive lust for moral equivalence, and its almost total fear of commitment to any principle, repeats endlessly the mantra that “Christian armies were just as bad during the Crusades.” Leaving for those better qualified than I the question of whether this is factually true, I would question its relevance.

The difference, as I see it (sadly, again and again), is that while people proclaiming to be Christians have no doubt done a great many bad things under its banner, Christianity as a whole has rejected militarism and violence as religious practice. That is, what violence is carried on in the “Christian” (or “Judeo-Christian”) West is carried out by people who may be ‘Christian’ in a cultural or religious sense, but they are not carried out by Christians qua Christians; their violence is not an inherent part of that Christian observance. Catholics and Protestants in Ireland may blow each other up, but the dispute is basically a secular, political one; it’s not that either group believes that it is incumbent upon them, as good Catholics/Protestants, to slay all the infidel Protestants/Catholics in order to rack up free virgins in the beyond.

Peters goes on:

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.

Magnificent. But I don’t think it’s enough to make public statements of outrage, though this is an absolute requirement. In the Arab world (which, let’s face it, has an unavoidable and systemic overlap with the Muslim one), what one says publically seems to means exactly zero. It’s what you do that matters; or more precisely, what you are known as doing. So talk won’t get it done. It’s way, way past time for Muslim leaders to “clean house” in their own mosques and schools, or else there will no longer be a reason for anyone, least of all the non-Muslim world, to carry on with what will then be an obvious pretense.

Wahhabism may indeed be a mutant, aberrant strain of the Islamic faith. But if so, it’s time, far past time, for the loudest, longest, and most violent actions against these vile and godless swine (terms I’ve chosen carefully) to come from “mainstream” Islam, whatever that is. Is anybody out there?