Arab world harshly condemns slaughter of Russian children

By Megan K. Stack
Los Angeles Times

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CAIRO, Egypt — Expressions of shame and self-reproach swept the Arab world yesterday as Muslims mourned the deaths of Russian schoolchildren and voiced unusually critical condemnations of the social ills widely blamed here for breeding terrorism.

The Arab world has watched with mounting disgust in recent weeks as a wave of civilian hostages — some of them Arabs and Muslims — were slaughtered by masked insurgents in Iraq. This weekend, newspapers and satellite channels were dominated by pictures of bloodied, naked children in southern Russia fleeing armed guerrillas suspected to be Islamic rebels supporting an independent Chechyna.

Many Arabs faced an ever-more-common dilemma: struggling to reconcile their sympathy for a political cause with growing revulsion at the wrath leveled by self-described "holy warriors" against innocents.

Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist and columnist for Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, wrote that the TV and newspaper images "showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families."

In an editorial, the Saudi Arab News condemned the school hostage-takers, "who 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."

Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, Egypt's highest-ranking cleric, also railed at the attackers.

"What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?" Tantawi said during Friday prayers in the Egyptian town of Benha. "You are taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims."

Tantawi's refrain was a familiar one among Muslims who've felt unfairly tarred by the bloodbaths carried out by fellow believers: This wasn't Islam.

Yesterday, some prominent Arabs came forward with a more sobering interpretation: Corrupt, repressed Arab and Islamic societies have turned into breeding grounds for terrorism. It's a judgment often heard among Western critics, but rarely voiced in heavily censored Arab rhetoric.
 
"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims," wrote Abdulrahman al Rashed, general manager of the Al-Arabiya television channel. In a blunt column in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Rashed listed attacks carried out by Muslims in Iraq, Russia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

"Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," he wrote. "The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.