A provocative essay from the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, saying what I have been saying all along:
“There is a line connecting this weekend’s mass murder in a school in North Ossetia, the ongoing genocide in Sudan, the bomb blasts on Madrid trains, the bombing of Istanbul synagogues and the suicide bombings in Be’er Sheva,” Ha’aretz journalist Ze’ev Schiff wrote in Sunday’s paper. “That line is Islamic – for the most part Arab – terrorism and it endangers world peace.”
In the post- 9/11 world, which still views Israel as a greater threat to global security than the concentration camps of North Korea or nuclear ambitions of Iran, the news that Arab jihadists made up at least 10 of the two dozen so-called Chechen freedom fighters that killed some 350 children, parents and teachers in a southern Russian school on Friday has caused something of an earthquake.
“We have to admit we showed no understanding of the danger of processes occurring in our own country and the world at large. We failed to react appropriately to them and, instead, displayed weakness,” President Vladimir Putin said in a somber televised address that followed a week of devastating terrorist attacks, including the loss of two domestic passenger aircraft and a Moscow subway blast, at the hands of three separate female suicide bombers. “And the weak are always beaten,” he added.
In the Egyptian capital of Cairo a prominent Arab writer and television executive admitted on Saturday that Muslims worldwide are the main perpetrators of terrorism, and it is high term the Arab world acknowledge it. “Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,” Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television wrote in his daily column in the pan-Arab pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. The article ran under the headline, “The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!”
Meanwhile in Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent condolences to Russia, proposing on Sunday that Moscow and Jerusalem work together in the global fight against Islamic terror on the eve of scheduled talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
According to an Israeli official quoted in The Jerusalem Post, President Putin’s speech following the bloody end to the school seizure in Beslan marked a significant break from Russia’s attempt in the past to isolate Chechen terror from the issue of radical Islamic terrorism.
In the past, the official said, the Russians “isolated their problem, said it was a Russian problem that they can handle themselves. Now it seems they realize that in Chechnya, like here, you have local organizations supported from outside sources residing in places where they have immunity and sanctuary.”