Russian children hostage

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-29-2004
Russian children hostage
79
Wed, 09-01-2004 - 1:55pm
I have looked at many different boards, on many different sites on this and I am disturbed by the fact most people seem to be embracing hate. On one site people were advocating extermination of all musilims(sp?). Is any one else disturbed by this?

I think we can all agree that we want the children and other to come out of that school safely. Why don't we each spend a few minutes in prayer to our respective God or gods for the safety of these people and the sanity of our race. I find it so hard to understand anyone advocating the complete extermination of a religion, or group of people. We may not be able to change some of those attitudes, but we can sure as hell try. Compassion is indiginous to all isn't it?

Pages

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 09-04-2004 - 11:08am

Thought some might be interested in Talking Point on the BBC site. Lots of opinions from Russia & around the globe.


Russian school siege: Your reaction........


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/3624494.stm

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Sat, 09-04-2004 - 11:15am

Self-criticism in Arab media follows school siege
Al-Arabiya GM: Muslims are main perpetrators of terrorism


The Associated Press

Updated: 6:32 a.m. ET Sept. 4, 2004



CAIRO, Egypt - Muslims worldwide are the main perpetrators of terrorism, a humiliating and painful truth that must be acknowledged, a prominent Arab writer and television executive wrote Saturday, as Middle East media and officials expressed horror at the bloody rebel siege of a Russian school.


Unusually forthright self-criticism followed the end of the hostage crisis, along with warnings that such actions inflict more damage to the image of Islam than all its enemies could hope. Arab leaders and Muslim clerics denounced the school seizure as unjustifiable and expressed their sympathy.


Russian commandos stormed the school Friday in Beslan, Russia; it had been taken over by rebels demanding independence for Chechnya. Russian officials said Saturday that the death toll was at least 250, with twice as many wounded. Many of the casualties were children.


Images of terrified young survivors being carried from the scene aired repeatedly on Arab TV stations. Pictures of dead and wounded children ran on front pages of Arab newspapers Saturday.


“Holy warriors” from the Middle East long have supported fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed.


“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 published in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. It ran under the headline, “The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!”


'Humiliating, painful' picture
Al-Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups — in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of the al-Qaida terror network.


“Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims,” he wrote. Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless “we admit the scandalous facts,” rather than offer condemnations or justifications.


“The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us,” al-Rashed wrote.


Contributors to Islamic Web sites known for their extremist content had mixed reactions on the hostage crisis, with some praising the separatists. Others wrote that people should wait until the militants had been identified before implicating Arabs in the drama.


Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in his column in Egypt’s leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, that hostage-takers in Russia as well as in Iraq are only harming Islam.


“If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it ... they wouldn’t have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age,” Bahgat wrote.


'A new low'
The horrifying images of the dead and wounded Russian students “showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families.”


An editorial in the Saudi English-language Arab News put some blame for the bloody end to the school siege on Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he couldn’t afford to lose his “tough-man image.” But it added that “the Chechens, with the choice of their targets, had put themselves in a position where no one would shed tears when the punishment came. They reached a new low when they chose toddlers as bargaining chips.”


Heads of state from Egypt, Lebanon and Kuwait offered their sympathy Friday to Russian officials and to the families of people caught up in the hostage drama. A prominent Muslim cleric also denounced it.


“What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?” Egypt’s top Muslim cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, was quoted as saying during a Friday sermon in Banha, 30 miles north of Cairo.


“You are taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims,” Tantawi, who heads Al-Azhar University, the highest authority in the Sunni Islamic world, was quoted by Egypt’s Middle East News agency as saying.


© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5912071/


Avatar for baileyhouse
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sat, 09-04-2004 - 1:11pm
It is true. Good Muslims need to take a more active roll in controling the small percentage of radical extremist that are out there. If they don't it will soon be "open season" on all Muslims.
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-08-2004
Sat, 09-04-2004 - 1:42pm
I agree with you on this. Sadly, compassion is just a word in our world today...not something people show. Whoever did this hostage situation, attacked the defenseless and it's such a cowardly act. I don't wish for any race to be wiped out. Muslims included. remember what Hitler did to the Jews. God said that He would never destroy the earth again, but man is doing a darn good job of it. Not all Muslims hate Americans and vice versa. I have noticed just how much racism that is going on in today's world and I am teaching my children not to put someone else down just because they have a different colored skin, or different beliefs. (However, I don't have a nice word for an atheist!) I belief in what Jesus Christ said before He left this earth...Love one another as I have loved you. I don't care if people say that He was just a "good person", He spoke the truth and no one follows it. If people would read the Bible a bit more often, and allowed God back where He belongs, we wouldn't have the problems that we do today. There are only a very few of us who still believes in showing compassion and love to our fellow man. Please know that you are not alone in this.....

Kelley
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-29-2004
Sat, 09-04-2004 - 9:20pm
It is nice to know. Over and Over I see words advocating compassion and love. Perhaps we (who advocate compassion and love) are not as few as we somtimes feel.
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-03-2004
Sun, 09-05-2004 - 3:47am
You know what is terrible? We live in 2004, have made amazing advances in technology, medicine etc, BUT we still haven't learnt to live peacefully with each other!!!!!!!! We still can't respect other people's religions and beliefs!

Looking at our behaviour (and especially in light of that hideous thing the Chechen terrorists did in taking hostage a school - my mind can't comprehend how someone, much less a group would actually CHOOSE to take children hostage), it seems that we haven't advanced at all in over 2000 years.

Is it so difficult to show compassion and understanding to each other? Why does violence seem to be our answer to almost everything??

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sun, 09-05-2004 - 12:07pm
I remember posting an article some time ago where a moderate muslim said that our all out attack against muslims made it difficult for them because if they sided with the US then the terrorist would turn on them and their effectiveness would be lost. Meaning quite simply that war creates more problems.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sun, 09-05-2004 - 12:19pm
<>

You are correct we need to understand others. But if you can't imagine what type of circumstances would lead a person to choose to take children, then you will never understand the terrorists. To have compassion for all means compassion for the terrorists also, otherwise they become inhuman and no sollution is possible. Having compassion doesn't mean condoning actions.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-05-2004
Sun, 09-05-2004 - 1:13pm


BESLAN, Russia (AP) - A shaken President Vladimir Putin made a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness Saturday in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists after more than 340 people - nearly half of them children - were killed in a hostage-taking at a southern school.

Putin went on national television to tell Russians they must mobilize against terrorism. He promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption.

"We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten," he said in a speech aimed at addressing the grief, shock and anger felt by many after a string of attacks that have killed some 450 people in the past two weeks, apparently in connection with the war in Chechnya.

Shocked relatives wandered among row after row of bodies lined up in black or clear plastic body bags on the pavement at a morgue in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, where the dead from the school standoff in the town of Beslan were taken. In some open bags lay the contorted, thin bodies of children, some monstrously charred.

In Beslan, people scoured lists of names to see if their loved ones survived the chaos of the day before, when the standoff turned violent Friday as militants set off explosives in the school and commandos moved in to seize the building.

Beslan residents were allowed to enter the burned-out husk that was once the gymnasium of School No. 1, where more than 1,000 hostages were held during the 62-hour ordeal that started Wednesday. The gym's roof was destroyed, windows shattered, walls pocked with bullet holes.

Regional Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said 323 people, including 156 children, were killed. More than 540 people were wounded - mostly children. Medical officials said 448 people, including 248 children, remained hospitalized Saturday evening.

Dzgoyev also said 35 attackers - heavily-armed and explosive-laden men and women reportedly demanding independence for the Chechen republic - were killed in 10 hours of battles that shook the area around the school with gunfire and explosions.

Putin made a quick visit to the town before dawn Saturday, meeting local officials and touring a hospital to speak with wounded. He stopped to stroke the head of an injured child.

But some in the region were unimpressed, as grief turned to anger, both at the militants and the government response.

Marat Avsarayev, a 44-year-old taxi driver in Vladikavkaz, questioned why Putin and other politicians didn't "even think about fulfilling the (militants') demands to save the lives of the children. Probably because it wasn't their children here."

During his visit to Beslan, Putin stressed that security officials had not planned to storm the school - trying to fend off potential criticism that the government side provoked the bloodshed. He ordered the region's borders closed while officials searched for anyone connected to the attack.

"What happened was a terrorist act that was inhuman and unprecedented in its cruelty," Putin said in his televised speech later. "It is a challenge not to the president, the parliament and the government but a challenge to all of Russia, to all of our people. It is an attack on our nation."

Including the school disaster, more than 450 people have been killed in the past two weeks in violence. Two planes crashed nearly simultaneously on Aug. 24, killing 90 people, and a suicide bomber killed eight people in Moscow on Tuesday. Chechen separatists are suspected in both attacks.

Putin took a defiant tone, acknowledging Russia's weaknesses but blaming it on the fall of the Soviet Union, foreign foes seeking to tear apart Russia and on corrupt officials. He said Russians could no longer live "carefree" and must all confront terrorism.

Measures would be taken, Putin promised, to overhaul the law enforcement organs, which he acknowledged had been infected by corruption, and tighten borders.

"We are obliged to create a much more effective security system and to demand action from our law enforcement organs that would be adequate to the level and scale of the new threats," he said.

An unidentified intelligence official was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying the school assault was financed by Abu Omar As-Seyf, an Arab who allegedly represents al-Qaida in Chechnya, and masterminded by Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev.

Also, the Federal Security Service chief in North Ossetia, Valery Andreyev, said Saturday that investigators were looking into whether militants had smuggled explosives and weapons into the school and hid them during a renovation this summer.

It was still unclear exactly how the standoff fell apart into bloodshed at 1 p.m. on Friday. Officials say security forces were forced to act when hostage-takers set off explosives. But some questioned that version.

The militants seized the school on the first day of classes Wednesday, herding hundreds of children, parents who had been dropping their kids off, and other adults into the gymnasium, which the militants promptly wired with explosives - including bombs hanging from the basketball hoops. The packed gym became sweltering, and the hostage-takers refused to allow in food or water.

One survivor, Sima Albegova, told the Kommersant newspaper she asked the militants why the captives were taken. "Because you vote for your Putin," one militant told her, she said.

Another freed hostage said a militant told her, "If Putin doesn't withdraw forces from Chechnya and doesn't free our arrested brothers, we'll blow everything up," according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.

Russian officials said the violence began when explosions were apparently set off by the militants - possibly by accident - as emergency workers entered the school courtyard to collect the bodies of hostages killed in the initial raid Wednesday.

Diana Gadzhinova, 14, said the militants ordered her and other hostages to lie face down in the gymnasium as the bodies were collected.

"They told us that there were going to be talks," she was quoted as telling Iszvestia. Others also told of how militants appeared to be confused and surprised at the initial explosions.

Hostages fled during the blasts, and the militants shot at them, prompting security forces to open fire and commandos to move in, officials said.

The explosions tore through the roof of the gymnasium, sending wreckage down on hostages and killing many. Many survivors emerged naked, covered in ashes and soot, their feet bloody from jumping barefoot out of broken windows to escape.

With families gathering for wakes for the dead Saturday, some were vowing vengeance.

"Fathers will bury their children, and after 40 days (the Orthodox mourning period) ... they will take up weapons and seek revenge," said Alan Kargiyev, a 20-year-old university student in Vladikavkaz.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040905/D84T5O280.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-02-2004
Sun, 09-05-2004 - 2:16pm
>>> Good Muslims need to take a more active roll in controling the small percentage of radical extremist that are out there.<<

why is it that people think they are NOT. They are as active as christians are in stopping hate groups, denouncing hate groups, fighting hate, racism, and terrorists etc. But even when they denounce terrorism it is lambasted as empty rhetoric. As for it being open season on muslims, it already is, people just are not seeing it because they are not on the receiving end.

alfreda, wife of a muslim

Pages