Azerbaijan: Jihadist plot against kindergarten, school foiled

Esquire magazine, of all places, had a gripping, detailed and incredibly moving account of the events at Beslan.

http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0606BESLAN_140

My favourite hostage was one father, a veteran of the Russian army, who very patiently and carefully, under the noses of the captors, managed to snap the *live* fuse-wire that led to the particular charge that was directly over the heads of himself and his family. Once he had done that, he knew that if the switch was tripped, that particular charge would NOT explode.

"Kazbek Misikov stared at the bomb hanging above his family. It was a simple device, a plastic bucket packed with explosive paste, nails, and small metal balls. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. The existence of this bomb had become a central focus of his life. If it exploded, Kazbek knew, it would blast shrapnel into the heads of his wife and two sons, and into him as well, killing them all.

"Throughout the day he had memorized the bomb, down to the blue electrical wire linking it to the network of explosives the terrorists had strung around them hours before...

"Now his mind worked methodically. He wanted no one to see what he planned to do. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his hand moved over the floor to the blue wire. Kazbek was forty-three.

"He had been a Soviet sapper as a younger man. He knew how bombs worked. He also knew how to disable them. The bomb overhead was part of a simple system, an open electric circuit rigged to a motor-vehicle battery. If the terrorists closed the circuit, current would flow from the battery through the wires and detonate the bombs.

"But if Kazbek pulled apart the wire inside its insulation, no current could flow.
Then, he knew, if the circuit snapped closed, the bomb above his family would not explode."...

"Kazbek had spent much of the day folding the wire back and forth, making a crimp. It
was only a matter of time.

"He lifted the wire.
Back and forth he folded the notch, working it, looking directly at the men who would kill him if they knew what he was doing. He would disconnect this bomb.

" It was a step. Every step counted. His mind kept working. How does my family get out?

...

And a bit further on in the article:

"Kazbek Misikov felt the wire separate between his fingers. His task was done: Inside its insulation, the wire had broken. But chance contact, he knew, might still allow a spark to jump across, and he needed to be sure the two ends could not meet incidentally. This required a finishing touch, and Kazbek grasped the blue plastic on either side of the crimp and stretched it like licorice, putting distance between the severed ends inside.

"Now a new problem presented itself. Stretching the plastic had turned it a whitish blue. The defect was obvious. The terrorists had inspected the wires and bombs several times, and if they checked again, they would discover his subterfuge...

"When a terrorist strolled past him, he addressed him politely. "This wire lies across the passage," he said. "They are tripping on it. Neither you nor we need these to explode."

"What can be done?" the terrorist said.
"If we had a nail, the wire could be hung," Kazbek said.

"The terrorist returned with a hammer and spike. Kazbek stood and drove the spike into the wall. He lifted the wire from the floor and laid a few turns around the shank, taking care to wrap with the whitish-blue section. He put a wooden spool on the spike and pressed it tight.

"The severed portion of wire was hidden. Kazbek had succeeded. He sat back with his family beneath the disconnected bomb."

(And he got himself and his family out, in the end; that is how this particular story came to be told),

Right on Saleem..You put that shot up in the top right corner. Keep your stick on the ice!

Thanks for the link, Saleem. Tomorrow I will explore it.

Hey Shelldrake1972,

Thank you for calling me on my 'bullshit' tonight, Shelldrake1972.

I had a little too much to drink this afternoon with friends I suppose.

Anyways, I often use irony, and attempt to challenge people. Is this not self-explanatory, Shelldrake?

"I thought Muslims are forbidden to take alcohol..."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sure they are, but Muslims love to fully indulge in alcoholic beverages.

Make no mistake about it, Muslims thoroughly indulge in most of the sins / crimes that they decry.

Islam allows / bends the rules for such behavior...

I thought it was self-explanatory, given the context of your other posts.

Whatever it is, would threatening to vaporize it with a conventional or nuke strike have any deterrent effect on the violent activities of Muslims of the "extreme" or "religion hijacker" variety? If so, I'd love to believe some back channel communications could have a calming effect.

Credibility?
I don't know if he is a muzzlem or ex-muzzlem and we shouldn't waste time trying to find out. What we should remember is that the guy is perfectly nuts and ignore him in the future.

Puzzling interaction, indeed.

The access was by the women, of course. women move easily inside schools, and they are now just as trained in bombs and bombmaking as the male jihadists. Witness Moscow.

These animals. I can't wait to read the condemnations by Muslim "leaders". Link them all here, folks!

And Saleem...what gives?

Dumbledore's Army wrote:

Esquire magazine, of all places, had a gripping, detailed and incredibly moving account of the events at Beslan.
.................

Thanks for posting that, DDA. I often read Esquire, but I had missed that issue.

More:

My favourite hostage was one father...
.................

Wow—I agree. I think we all hope to be Kazbek Misikov—smart, cool-headed, brave—were we ever in such a horrific situation.

More:

Now I'm reminded of something that happened in Iraq. The Americans built a girls' school...someone happened to notice a rather odd loose bit of wire...which turned out to be a fuse - was that some of the eager-beaver locals employed in its construction, had taken the opportunity to surreptitiously incorporate a few 'extras' into the structure. Namely, explosive charges.
.................

Good God. More Jihad against *small children*. There are many factors, of course—but I consider it a very good yardstick of how healthy a culture is by how it treats children.

Look at Islam—with its raped child brides; its abused "pearly boys"; its pint-sized *suicide bombers*; its use of young boys to *clear mine fields*, equipped with nothing but a cheap plastic "key to Paradise" around their necks; its use of schools as staging areas for rocket attacks, which make the schools vulnerable to retaliatory attack—by people who likely don't realize a school is being so used; its blowing up of non-madrassah schools, especially girls' schools; its horrific attack on Beslan and aborted attack on this school in Azerbaijan...the Jihad against *children* is horrifying and unrelenting.

Muslim children are nothing but cannon fodder and the future breeding of more cannon fodder, with handy use as sex-slaves along the way. And Infidel children are nothing but—well, particularly vulnerable Infidels.

They also know how demoralizing it is to Infidels—most of whom cherish children—to lose their own children to bloody Jihad violence—or even being unable to protect Muslim kids from their own elders murderous tendencies.

When even Golda Meir's hawk-eyed perspicacity couldn't identify the bull's-eye of her own people's deadly enemy, and to boot demonstrated that failure even when PC MC's dominance throughout the West was significantly weaker, it would seem to indicate an amazingly pervasive denial-cum-ignorance in the West about Islam.

I've written about this before in comments threads.

This Western denial/ignorance of the evil deadliness of Islam is much older than the development of mainstream & dominant PC MC over the past half century. We can see it going back at least a couple of centuries before that -- though again, not in terms of a generalized sociopolitical culture throughout the West, as we have now, but nevertheless among a significant portion of intellectuals and artists.

First, Islam tended to recede more and more from the forefront of Western consciousness as its concrete military threat and capabilities receded dramatically after its final defeat in modern history, 1683 (with only Mediterranean piracy and colonial resistance here and there remaining to disturb Westerners at the edges). This diminution of Islam of course coincided with the spectacular ascendancy of the West beginning in the 16th century -- and increasing exponentially with each century after that -- to world dominance and influence to a degree unseen by any other power in all history.

Secondly, during most of that time from the 17th to the 20th centuries, the West was not so foolish as to encourage mass immigration of Muslims, giving Muslims therefore no chance to pursue a jihad by other means (infiltration, demographic aggrandizement, insinuation into various institutions, symbiosis with terror attacks here and there -- all of which require a physical presence of significant numbers of Muslims in the West).

Thirdly, I tend to agree with Bill Warner's theory that because of its millennial experience with Muslims -- beginning in the 8th century A.D. with the incursions and depredations of expanding Muslim armies overrunning Christian lands in the Middle East, North Africa and into Europe proper (Spain) and continuing for some ten centuries thereafter --the West underwent a massive, centuries-long, collective PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) from its centuries of being attacked, slaughtered, terrorized, enslaved and tortured by Muslims -- such that, by the time the West finally managed to relatively free itself from having to deal with Muslims in any significant way during that relatively brief window of time from the 17th century to the mid-20th century, the West collectively went through a kind of semi-conscious denial of all the horrors Muslims represented and inflicted upon them over those previous centuries. When Muslims began to reappear on the radar in the mid-20th century, and in each ensuing decade continued to escalate their revival of their heretofore relatively dormant Islam, there was a collective reluctance, below the threshhold of explicit consciousness, to abandon the sociopsychological mechanism of semi-conscious suppression in the Western mind of the terror & horror of Muslims: i.e., the West did not care to remember, and instead wished to continue in its denial.

Again, the three points above are meant to explain the curious denial/ignorance prior to the dominance of PC MC throughout the West, which has augmented those three points powerfully with a new worldview that recoils irrationally from any condemnation of Islam and of the Muslims who support Islam, out of a sincere belief that such condemnation (or even criticism) is tantamount to bigotry and "racism". This irrational reflex of the PC MC West increases, rather than decreases, the more that Muslims express and perpetrate outrageously unjust, evil and violent ideas and acts.

As our own General Casey hastened to anxiously assure us after a Muslim gunned down 13 American military personnel on American soil at Fort Hood, the maintenance of "diversity" is more important than preventing such massacres in the future. Casey's frighteningly asinine statement is emblematic of the guiding axiom of PC MC.

Good post, Hesperado—yes, even before "political correctness" became so pervasive, there was a widespread sentimentality about religion—religion as such, with no distinction made as to philosophy or worship. We are still suffering from the idea that *any* religion must—axiomatically—present a force for moral decency.

Bloody-minded and aggressive Islam has no "Golden Rule"—but few people allow themselves to learn this about Islam, and even fewer to say such out loud.