SUSCRIBO PALABRA POR PALABRA lo que escribe Ralph Peters sobre la salvajada de la escuela en Osetia del Norte:

THE mass murder of children revolts the human psyche. Herod sending his henchmen to massacre the infants of Bethlehem haunts the Gospels. Nothing in our time was crueler than what the Germans did to children during the Holocaust. 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.

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.

[...] The mass hostage situation wasn't about Chechen rebels (and at least 10 Arabs) opposing the Russian government. It was a continuation of the universal struggle between good and evil. And there is no doubt which side is evil, scorned though the word may be by our own elite.

How can any human being with a shred of conscience dismiss what occurred in that school as anything less than evil?

The attack in Beslan wasn't about Russia's brutal incompetence in Chechnya — as counter-productive as Moscow's grim heavy-handedness may have been. It was about religious bigotry so profound that the believer can hold a gun to a child's head, pull the trigger and term the act "divine justice."

We will hear complaints that the Russian special forces should have waited — even after the terrorists began shooting children. Negotiations are the heroin of Westerners addicted to self-delusion. Who among us would have waited when he or she saw fleeing children cut down by automatic weapons? The urge to protect children is as primal as any impulse we ever feel.

[...] A final thought: Did any of those protesters who came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50 million Muslims stay an extra day to protest the massacre in Russia? Of course not.

The protesters no more care for dead Russian children than they care for dead Kurds or for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein executed. Or for the ongoing Arab-Muslim slaughter of blacks in Sudan. Nothing's a crime to those protesters unless the deed was committed by America.

Amen, brother.

Por supuesto, hay quien dice que le gustaría haber leído más muestras de repulsa por la catástrofe "terrorista y policial". Ocurre que a veces es mejor homenaje un sentido silencio que el equiparar a los asesinos con quienes intentaron defender a las víctimas. No consiguieron una resolución incruenta de la crisis pero, como dice Ralph Peters, ¿realmente podíamos pedirles que asistieran impasibles mientras veían como ametrallaban a los niños por la espalda?

ACTUALIZACIÓN. Leed este post de Cori Dauber.

ACTUALIZACIÓN II. Esta página ha estado siguiendo al minuto la salvajada de la escuela de Beslan, con narración y fotografías.

ACTUALIZACIÓN III. Uno de los secuestrados narra su brutal experiencia; aquí hay más información.