Naming Names - Part 705

When I first “came out” on this blog as an apostate from the liberal church, I heard a number of old friends and acquaintances whispering, sometimes in front of me and sometimes behind my back, “Poor Roger, he’s scared. He got mugged by 9/11.” Well, no. I don’t scare that easily. I have my share of problems, but unbridled fear isn’t one of them. I was angry.

But now I am scared. 9/11 didn’t scare me. The Atocha railroad station didn’t scare me. The horrors of the Russian schoolhouse didn’t even scare me. It was the reaction by many in Europe and in our media to what happened in that school that has me terrified. Sure the Russians have historically brutalized and mistreated the Chechens, but this barbarism was far beyond a reaction to that. It goes to the core of our common humanity. It was a gauntlet thrown down at Western civilization and yet some still choose to look the other way. But if the sight of children being stripped and shot in the back after having had their gymnasium pre-wired with explosives doesn’t wake them up, I don’t know what will.

Yet sleep they do. Andrew McCarthy slogged all the way down to paragraph twenty-four of the NYT’s coverage this morning to find this strange and forlorn statement: “While the extent of international support may be debated, the attacks bear some trappings of Islamic militancy. Officials here in Beslan said they had found notebooks with Arabic writing, and witnesses reported hearing Arabic exhortations, though the attackers mostly spoke Russian.” (Emphasis added.)

I wonder what the paper would say if those same people took over Dalton. Scratch that – I don’t want to know. Years ago, it was “the love that dares not speak its name.” Now it is “the religion that dares not speak its name.” But as McCarthy wrote in his post, “What is the good reason to be hesitant about noting that this latest barbarity, like its numerous predecessors, is the work of militant Islam? An enemy that doesn’t get identified, doesn’t get wiped out — and lives to fight another day, resulting in more Beslans, more Madrids, more 9/11s, etc.”