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Subject: Terrorists Attack Russian School - Hold 400 Hostage Including 200 Children
Roman    9/1/2004 4:00:57 AM
These Muslim terrorists (I have no doubt it is them despite the fact that it has not been confirmed yet) are complete scum. From CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/09/01/russia.school/index.html Attackers seize Russian school Wednesday, September 1, 2004 Posted: 3:49 AM EDT (0749 GMT) A girl is hurried away from the scene. RELATED • Moscow suicide bomber kills 9 • Explosions led to Russia crashes YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS Chechnya (Russia) Russia or CREATE YOUR OWN Manage alerts | What is this? MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Armed attackers have seized a school in a town in southern Russia, and Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency says about 400 people, including 200 children, are being held. The Interfax news agency, citing Ismel Shaov, a regional spokesman for the Federal Security Service, said there were 17 attackers, both male and female, and the gang included some who were wearing explosive belts. Wednesday's seizure took place on the first day of the Russian school year, in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said. Video of the scene from Russian Television showed Russian forces stationed near the school, some of them behind a tank, as the sound of gunfire could be heard. A young girl and an older woman were hurried to safety by the armed forces. Beslan is located 19 miles (30 km) north of Vladikavkaz in southern Russia, which borders the troubled Russian republic of Chechnya. The seizure of the school comes a day after a female suicide bomber killed nine people and herself, and wounded 51 others when she detonated a bomb outside a subway station in northeastern Moscow. (Full story) Authorities did not immediately say if the female bomber was Chechen. The bombing marked the second major terrorist attack on Russia in a week, following the near simultaneous attacks on two Russian airliners by what authorities believe were two Chechen women suicide bombers. Eighty-nine people died in the crashes. Female Chechen suicide bombers are known in Russia as "black widows." Authorities have said traces of the explosive hexogen were found in the wreckage of both planes. Hexogen, when mixed with nitroglycerin, forms a plastic explosive similar to C4 and has been used by Chechen rebels in attacks on Russian soil in the past. Chechen rebels -- who refused to take part in Chechen elections held Sunday and vowed to take their fight to Russian soil -- have denied responsibility. But many Russian politicians are already linking them to Tuesday's suicide bombing, calling it revenge for the elections in which a Kremlin-backed candidate won the presidency. Russian troops have battled separatist guerrillas in Chechnya since 1994. In October 2002, about 50 Chechen rebels seized a Moscow theater and took about 800 hostages. After a three-day siege, Russian forces stormed the building using gas, killing most of the rebels and 120 hostages.
 
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Big Bad Pariah    Ethnic revenge looms in North Caucasus   9/21/2004 1:49:13 AM
After grief, ethnic revenge looms Seth Mydans NYT Monday, September 20, 2004 Mass killing in Beslan intensifies ancient hatreds in region KARTSA, Russia As grief begins to mutate into anger two weeks after the mass killings in Beslan, this drab little town not far away waits in fear for possible reprisals. The people here are ethnic Ingushis. The victims of the killings were mostly Ossetians. The feuds and hatreds between the groups go back too far to calculate. Little has been made public about the backgrounds of the attackers, and none have been identified as Ingushi, but there seems to be no doubt in the minds of the people of Beslan. "Ingushis!" shouted a group of mourners when asked this past weekend who was responsible. "Ingushis killed our children!" The people of Kartsa knew this would happen and began to feel the danger even before the hostage-taking was over on Sept. 3, said Zarema Tochiyeva, 40, a French teacher. "The word is that the Ossetians are preparing to attack us here," she said. "To them, Ingush is not a nationality but an enemy. Monsters. That's it. Once they've decided on that, they don't need to think any further." The two peoples fought a brief, brutal war just 12 years ago and Kartsa, a lonely enclave of about 5,000 people, still bears the scars in ruined and abandoned buildings. Both here and in Beslan, people are talking about Oct. 13, the end of a 40-day mourning period, when the traditional moment comes to contemplate revenge. Already, a local Ingushi doctor said, there have been small eruptions of violence in almost every village in the Prigorodny region, disputed land along the border with Ingushetia. Tochiyeva said some families were fleeing across the border into Ingushetia. Police at checkpoints have become more nervous, and border crossing points have been reinforced. The local agricultural institute has given its students an indefinite leave, residents said. Some children on vacation have been told to stay where they are. The fear now, expressed even by President Vladimir Putin, is that fighting could spread through the North Caucasus region of Russia, expanding the war in Chechnya and reigniting other simmering conflicts. "This is a rich, fertile ground for the growth of extremist propaganda and the recruitment of new supporters of terror," he said after the Beslan killings. "The North Caucasus is a key strategic region for Russia. It is a victim of terrorism and also a springboard for it." Like a number of experts on the region, Putin suggested that touching off conflict might have been the aim of the people who seized the Beslan school, killing more than 300 people, half of them children. He said the people who had organized the attack hoped to "rupture the fragile balance" of ethnic and religious differences in the region. Kartsa and the nearby Ingushi enclave of Mayski are the tinderbox. "It would take just one match and this whole place would go up in flames," said a policeman on the road into town. Already in recent months, killings, kidnappings and bombings have escalated in the republic of Ingushetia, which lies between North Ossetia and Chechnya, where a brutal 10-year-old war continues with no end in sight. On June 22, hundreds of well-armed rebels took over part of Ingushetia's capital, Nazran, raided an armory and killed up to 100 people before withdrawing and disappearing again into the hills. Long-running ethnic tensions have intensified recently in Dagestan, across the eastern border of Chechnya, where Chechen rebels briefly took over two villages in 1999 and proclaimed an Islamic state. To the west of North Ossetia, deep-rooted ethnic tensions divide two other republics whose names alone suggest the complexity of the region - Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayevo-Cherkessia. "The unique danger in my judgment is that there is a 'Chechen fuse' running to other ethnic conflicts," said Clifford Kupchan, vice president and senior fellow at the Nixon Center, a foreign policy research institute in Washington, in an e-mail interview. He said the Beslan siege might have been part of an attempt to ignite this fuse. The most recent grievances in North Ossetia are the direct result of the brutality of Stalin, who deported the Ingush and Chechens to Central Asia in 1944 and gave parts of Ingush land to the Ossetians. The exiles returned in the mid-1950s, after Stalin's death, and many reclaimed their homes. But the Prigorodny region remained in dispute and open warfare flared in 1992. Hundreds of people were killed and tens of thousands of Ingushis became refugees. The New York Times
 
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stratego    RE:To Those Who Downplay Terrorism--sanman   10/24/2004 1:12:06 AM
As David Horowitz points out in his book, Unholy Alliance, these people are the political descendents of the International Communists---people who claimed to believe in an ideal, but were really loyal to Soviet Communism. (Some of them are the same people.) Gerda Lerner is an example of such a person. She left the Communist Party in 1956 as a result of Krushcev's revelations about Stalin's crimes. But today, after all of the failures of Marxism, she continues on as a Marxist. "In Lerner's view, Marxism failed ot provide a proper map to the future not because it was based on false ecsonomic assumptions or utopian delusions about human possibilities, or failure to understand the link between liberty and property, but because Marxist theory gave inadequate attention to race and gender oppression." (Unholy Alliance). Next came the "New Left". Horowitz gives the example of Maurice Zeitlin, "a Berkeley Marxist and founder of Root and Branch, one of three radical journals that helped launch the new radical movement." In a famous interview with Che Geuvara, he challenged Che about his policy towared unions. Che was then the minister of trade unions and the number 2 man in Cuba behind his brother Fidel. Zeitlin asked Che if unions should be independent or appendages of the state as in Soviet Russia. He reminded Che that "the elimination of independent unions had paved the way for the Soviet police state and its infamous gulags." Che got angry and changed the subject. Zeitlin showed his initial idealism here. He really hoped Cuba could be different from the Soviet Union. But instead of facing the implications of the nature of Cuba, Zeitlin and the other editors of Root and Branch "rationalized their support [of Cuba] by telling themselves it was America's opposition to the Cuban revolution that was forcign the Castro regime to take a totalitarian course, even though the interview had taken place before the Bay of Pigs and before the regime had declared itself a socialist state." Next, accoridng to Horowitz, came Neo-Communism III, the Utopian Idea. "It is based on a utopian standard with no anchor in any actually existing reality." Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University professor and prticipant in the anti-Iraq War teach in at Columbia, is part of this group. His ideas were formed in the Vietnam era, essentially by Zeitlin and his ilk. How coudl he love the American people, he explained, when "'our people had commited genocide against the Indians, when our national history was enmeshed in slavery, when this experience of historical sin ran deeper than any class solidarity, when it was what it meant to be an American." Finally, we have neo-Communism IV---the Nihilsit Left, characterized by Naom Chomsky, identified by a New Yorker profile as "one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century". Here is an example of the great man's thoughts. "By Stalingrad in 1942, the Russians had turned back the German offensive, and it was pretty celar that Germany wasn't going to win the war. Well, we've learned from the Russian archives that Britain and teh U.S. then began supporting armies established by Hitler to hold back the Russian advance. Tens of thousands of Russian troops were killed. Suppose you're sitting in Aushwitz. Do you want the Russian troops to be held back?" This from the man with possibly more respected credentials as an "intellectual" than anyone on the Left today. To answer your question about how the Left can hold its positions, the answer is simple. They simply disengage from reality completely.
 
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stratego    RE:Putin blasts U.S. on terror stance--Darth--Sentinnel28a   2/21/2005 5:30:38 AM
Darth, your analysis is interesting. But did you know that the Russinas previously had custody of the guy who is supposed to have engineered the attack on the schoolchildren in Chechnya? (This is a well known fact, not in dispute. It happened some years ago. There was some supposed reason for letting him go, a trade of some kind or something.) This, to me, indicates direct Russian control of the operation. Not that your scenario wouldn't mesh perfectly with my thoughts here. Chechneya proves Russian "purity" on terror. I believe it was needed because the Russians never stopped controlling terror. You are clear on the fact that they used to. But many people do not see this clearly (obviously, they tried to obscure it even then, for the general public.) But now, the Russian connection to terror is even better hidden. It had to be to do 911. (In Soviet days, terrorists left the US largely alone because they realized our government would hodl them responsible.) Sentinal28a, you ripped me pretty hard on this previously. I wanted to respond, but unfortunately, I was in a period of very much exhaustion due to work pressures and did not want to engage you on this while in a low energy state, because it is absolutely central. However, now that I am able to respond, I cannot find your post, and I foolishly failed to cut and paste it to my PC. I believe the reason Putin is not afraid to do things like 911 now is because he has absolute confidence in the opaqueness of the connection between himself and bin Laden. Recently I read an article (probably on SP) about an Egyptian terrorist who had been arrested by the Russians and held for some time. Previous to his arrest, he was not focused on anti-US stuff, but afterward, he was. He joined al Queda and became one of the top guys. The article speculated that he was still under Russian influence. However, if alQueda knew they had a Russian mole, and they were not under Russian control, they would kill him. I believe this individual was arrested by the Russians for purposes of communicating with al Queda, a standard intelligence trick. I apologize for the many deficiencies of this post.
 
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stratego    RE:Putin blasts U.S. on terror stance--Darth--Sentinnel28a   2/21/2005 8:08:47 PM
One aspect of my interchange with Sent was that I pointed out that terrorists do not purposefully target children as it is bad PR. I believe this is generally true, though I'm trying to recall if there are exceptions in anti-Israel terror. Sents rebuttals were, as I recall: that the Palis don't worry about killing Israeli children and many die in their attacks, and McVeigh targeted a Pizzeria that mainly would have had an after school crowd there. In regard to the first point, I don't deny that the Palis have killed many Israeli children along with the adults and I'm sure they are happy when it happens. That is different, however, from targeting a school, focusing specifically on children, as in Chechnyea. Different in tersm of PR. Mcviegh (Oklahoma bomber) on hte other hand, was apparently isolated and not well connected to a terror group, as far as we know. Hence, his actions are more those of an individual, and hence less predictable than those of a group.
 
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stratego    RE:Putin blasts U.S. on terror stance--Darth--Sentinnel28a   2/21/2005 8:14:27 PM
In terms of Putin's risk of running terror, remember, the Russian KGB created modern terror and ran it for decades. They ahd plenty of time to insert some very strong "cutouts" into the system. They would have had plenty of opportunity to "get to" bin Laden in a way that no one would have noticed---after all, he fought against them in Afghanistan---a very primitive country full of remote places---a country that was under Russian control. Since then, Russian contact with bib Laden could be extremely indirect. I'm not saying day-to-day control would be exercised or denyign that bin Laden might operate indepenedently of Russian orders for even years at a time, if necessary. I'ms saying when a command from Putin comes in (probably carried by a person, verbally, not sent by any other means) bin Laden obeys. In addition, Putin would define the boundaries of action between commands.
 
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