When Bad Things Should Happen to Bad People...
Mood:  on fire
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Having seen on the television news that the toll of the dead and missing - mostly children - could go as high as 400 after the tragedy at that school in Russia, I can't feel much but the dark, bitter sadness best left undescribed for the tragic deaths, mingled with the burning urge to punish those responsible.

And "those responsible" are more than a handful of screwed-up punks with machine guns and rocket launchers who took that school over last week.

Before Saudi Arabia started sending its missionaries throughout the world, Chechnya's own national form of Islam was not the strident, blood-thirsty version which is preached from Saudi Arabia, the Islam of ibn Wah'hab... who helped build the modern Saudi State centuries ago by allying radical imams with the Saudi princes. Chechnyan Islam was not of the bomb-throwing variety before, but now it certainly has fallen into line with worldwide Wah'habism.

At the end of the first stage of the Wah'habi struggle to control all around them, most of the Hejaz peninsula was united under the austere Islam of ibn Wah'hab. The tolerance taught by the Prophet Muhammad for the People of the Book, Jews and Christians, was replaced by a simmering hatred which extended even to other Muslims who did not agree with the changes ibn Wah'hab had made to Islam - and which he tried to impose on the Saudis' neighbors at the point of the sword until just after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One.

It seems that the imams of Saudi Arabia have been getting ambitious of late, preaching again that the lives of the rest of us who share this planet with the followers of Ibn Wah'hab are worth less than those of believers. They have been raising money for many years and sending missionaries throughout the world to get Muslims to accept this message and to take up the bloody sword against the rest of us.

The result? (not a complete list at all)
- the embassy bombings
- the murder of American and other servicemen in the Khobar Towers bombing
- the murder of hundreds of Marines and other Americans in the Beirut barracks bombing
- the bombing of the USS Cole
- the attacks of September 11th, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
- the apartment house bombings in Moscow
- the disastrous movie theater hostage stand-off in Moscow
- the train bombings at Madrid
- the anthrax attacks in America
- the attempted release of ricin in a train station in Paris
- the destruction of two Russian airlners by suicide bombers late last month
- the murder of hostages in order to try to get a law repealed in France, or to get members of the international military coalition in Iraq to defect
- and finally, the cowardly and despicable hostage taking at an elementary school in southern Russia.

This is nonsense, people.

It's time to put all the touchy-feely crap about cultural sensitivity away and talk about real solutions.

The Saudis apparently have deluded themselves that they can pay their rabid hate-filled surrogates to do these things and not pay a price beyond the money they spent to make these cowardly acts happen in the first place.

They forgot who Vladimir Putin worked for before the fall of the Soviet Union. President Putin was, in his past life, an officer of the Soviet Committee for State Security, or in Russian, Komitet v Gosudarstvannoye Bezopasnosti - the KGB.

I mention this because in the old days, Islamists hijacked a Soviet Aeroflot airliner ONCE. The hijackers sent a list of demands to Moscow, and in return received a parcel containing certain reproductive organs excised from male relatives of the hijackers by KGB operatives. The plane and hostages were released forthwith.

I hate to appear to endorse such a grisly solution to the problem of Islamist terrorism... but it worked. From that point on, only two airlines could count on not having their planes hijacked - Aeroflot and El Al.

The Arabs appear to have let their short memories get the better of them. There comes a point when, if the Saudi people, clergy and royal family all are content to pay for terrorism and the deaths of innocent people in terrorist incidents, then their actions require an appropriate punishment.

Bombing Chechnya would do little or no good - the Chechens themselves have little power to change the ways of the terrorist scum who pretend to act in their behalf.

It's time to cauterize the abcess from which the infection is spreading.

Both the United States of America and the Republic of Russia maintain strategic nuclear arsenals which can be launched after only minor preparations. Long lists of cities, military bases and industrial plants belonging to potential adversaries are kept ready to be electronically programmed into our ICBMs in minutes. Should the worst happen, any or all of these cities, military bases and industries could cease to exist in under an hour.

It's time for the West - and philosophically, culturally and theologically Russia is part of the West- to stop pretending that sweet reason is going to prevail against bloodthirsty, conscienceless terrorism and extremism.

We and the Russians need to alter our lists of nuclear destruction to reflect current realities, and to let the Saudis know that it is not our culture they are about to destroy, but theirs.

And after that, we and the Russians, and any other countries who care to stand beside us must remain vigilant against those who would pervert worship into a warrant for hatred, murder and conquest.

If we must use it, salt is cheaper than rot, and fire less harmful than pestilence.