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Points of View
"While President Putin PosturesAmericans would do well to consider lessons of Beslan.A somber time for all of us as we recall the horror of 9/11. A somber time made worse as Russian families bury their dead from the massacre at a schoolhouse in Beslan. How do you make any sense of the murder of children? What kind of liberation ideology celebrates the slaughter of innocents? What kind of government is so inept that it fails to have a contingency plan (including an elite strike force as well as ambulances available) when the unthinkable occurs?We Americans would do well to consider some of the lessons of Beslan. The first is that nothing is unthinkable. In 1972, I accompanied 18 students from Youngstown State University on a six-week tour of Europe, what we all remembered as "the trip from Hell." What most of us put out of our memories was the fact that the trip was sandwiched between terrorist attacks upon the Lod Airport in Israel and the Munich massacre that left 11 Israeli Olympians dead in September 1972. Two weeks aboard the Epiroliki liner Hermes taught all of us how woefully inadequate security measures were aboard cruise ships in the Mediterranean. None of us were shocked when terrorists commandeered an Israeli yacht from Larnaca, Cyprus, a few years later, or when another group hijacked the Achille Lauro out of Egypt in 1985.After 40 years of hijackings, assassinations, suicide bombings, and bodies being torn apart on the streets of Ramallah, nothing in this world is unthinkable for Israelis. Armed guards patrol playgrounds, shopping malls and religious shrines in the Jewish state. But, as recent terrorist attacks at the main bus station in Beersheba attest, no police force or military can guarantee absolute safety for its people.If that is true, then in any discussion of a crisis we ought to have our terminology straight. Two former New York mayors, Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch, have been preaching for years that there can be no moral equivalence between people who train their children to kill and die and those who want their children to sing and color. The people who wired a gymnasium in Beslan with explosives were not commandoes, guerillas or freedom fighters. They were no heroes engaged in a military action against occupiers. Nor were they mercenaries engaged by a Chechen liberation front for the purpose of sacrificing themselves for money. (Can anyone explain the maniacal statement related by one of the terrorists? What kind of suicide zealot makes his life available to the highest bidder?)Like their comrades who left more than 150 captives dead in an opera house in Moscow two years ago, they are murderers. The only mitigation of their crimes -- the ruthlessness and incompetence of their Russian adversaries. Time and again since Chechnya attempted to break away from the remnants of the Soviet Union in 1993, Moscow has been condemned by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other humanitarian groups for beatings, rapes and killings of Chechen civilians, and desecration of Chechen shrines. Little has been done to improve the situation. Russia's President Putin postures for the press. Russian colleagues contribute to the development of Iran's nuclear program. Chechen nationalism, a byproduct of Khomeini's Islamic revolution, has become progressively radical. And as in Bosnia and Kosovo, there are no clear-cut good guys, just dead children."