The Beslan School Memorial
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
  The developing Islamic response to Beslan Filed under: Islamism— Jason Hayes @ 1:25 pm
Further to my post, that lauded Abdel Rahman al-Rashed’s response to the very clear role of Islam in world terrorism as well as my wondering what sort of response the remainder of the Islamic world would have to the murder of several hundred children, I stopped by the CAIR site to check out their response.

As they are a key, if not the primary, public voice of Islam in North America, I figured that they would be out there openly denouncing the terrorist attacks on innocent and unarmed school children, parents, and teachers at the Beslan school.

The lead story on the CAIR site describes a “Dear Colleague” letter sent by Barney Frank and ten other member of Congress to George Bush, seeking to have Lt. Gen. William Boykin fired as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence for what the CAIR site described as “anti-Muslim remarks made while in official military uniform.”

The only story about “Russia” that is available through a search of the CAIR site is one from July 2002 that described how the Russian military was “killing dozens of Chechens each month“.

Despite the passage of approximately one week, CAIR has not seen fit to address the Beslan hostage taking on their web site.

Interesting.

Thankfully, other sources had a bit more balance.

A Google search on “Beslan” gives an Islam Online article that ignores any mention of Islamism and the al-Qaeda link and instead focuses on the Russian government’s reactions to the hostage taking (past injustices, restrictions on the media, human rights infringements committed by the Russians). Another Islam Online article also ignored the link to extremist Islamist terrorists and concentrated almost wholly on the Russian military presence and injustices in Chechnya.

One other article did, however, note that Russian Muslim leaders (quite rightly) decried the the hostage taking as a “heinous terrorist crime” that was forbidden by Islam.

Muslim leaders in Russia have sharply condemned holding hundreds of children hostage by an armed group in the north of the country.

A number of armed men and women, some strapped with explosives, broke into a school in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia on Wednesday, September1 , killing seven people, and herding pupils, parents and teachers into a gym.

The Russian Fatwa Council denounced the abduction, saying it is “a terrorist act that Islam totally refuses and forbids.”

“The council condemns the act of taking hostages and the metro blast taken place Tuesday in northern Moscow,” Ramil Bilayev, the council’s spokesman told IslamOnline.net over phone.

He went on: “The council’s chairman Ravil Gainutdin had described what happened as a terrorist act that Islam totally refuses and forbids and urged for a swift release of the hostages.”

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