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Dr. Walid Phares
Jihad Against Children Must Trigger Global Response
September 9, 2009
Wars have always had inhuman results, no matter what is the scale. Since
the early 20th century, terrorism has perpetrated mass killing of
innocents, condemned by all moral values. Salafi jihadism in particular
has produced extreme scales of bloodshed against civilians, comparing
with the monstrosity of totalitarian regimes under Hitler or Pol Pot,
among others.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and throughout the 1990s, Salafi
terror groups operating from the Philippines to Algeria have butchered
families, students, journalists, elderly, and the weakest elements of
civil society.
Children, too, have been murdered during these ghazwas (jihadi raids).
In the post 9/11 era, al-Qaida, the Taliban, Indonesia’ Jemaa, the
Janjaweed in Darfur and the Shabab of Somalia, among others, have bombed
and slaughtered kids. The al-Muhayya bombing in Saudi Arabia, the Amman
bloody wedding, and the Baghdad’s surreal infanticides are only examples
as to how Salafi jihadists and Khomeinist operatives have gone in their
devastation of children’s lives.
Obviously, the young souls lost in New York, Madrid, and London
testifies to the universality of jihadi terror. The latter’s ideologues
do not exclude children from their operations, regardless of any
consideration: The “caliphate” can be built on the skulls of all
enemies, Muslims and non Muslim alike. But five years ago in Beslan, the
zombies of jihadism took the Caucuses’ population to an unreached low.
Not only did the so-called “separatists” target specifically a school in
the Russian town of Beslan, but they built their tactical goals on
causing pain to the kids and their parents. We now know the details of
the operation and have seen the atrocious pictures of boys and girls
laying dead or being whisked out from the premises covered in blood.
However, even if massacres can’t be compared when collective punishments
are exerted on the little ones, Beslan’s killings have something
peculiar in its horror: a calculated will to display the scenery of
captured children via media all over the world: The Jihadi Kamikazes
were proud of doing it. For whatever the “Chechen cause” is, and
regardless of the political debate surrounding it, Beslan’s savage
“intention” shattered any demands the armed terrorists were allegedly
advancing.
Fighting face to face or even as a guerilla is one thing; targeting
children specifically is a very different matter. The real message from
that tragic episode, at least the one that has registered in Russia and
around the world, is that jihadi terrorism has no moral bounders. Or at
least the Takfiri Salafi strain, which nevertheless is an emanation from
Wahhabism. Neither the international community, nor the Muslim societies
subscribing to universal human rights can accept the premise of such
inhuman violence when it openly, unashamedly, and ideologically,
legitimizes infanticide. There are simply no merciful spaces in any set
of legal traditions, from Scotland to Jordan that can incorporate a
legitimization of Beslan’s motives.
But regardless of legal and doctrinal debates, Beslan sent irreversible
chills throughout the globe. Notwithstanding academic discussion of
Chechen and Russian politics, the raw scenes affected moms and dads
around the world. Mumbai’s urban jihad alerted citizens across the
planet that it can happen in any city. But Beslan’s butchery awoke basic
instincts of parents: it can happen in any neighborhood, any school.
Even if top government advisers in Brussels and Washington are claiming
jihadism is just a “spiritual experience,” this ideology has committed
unforgivable sins. Its doctrinaires have often repeated (and were heard
on satellite TV and in chat rooms) that punishment of the enemy can
require millions of children dead.
Beslan’s long-term effect is going to harden democratic societies and
crumble the argument that engagement with totalitarians can mitigate
their actions. Only political development within civil societies where
the jihadists are produced can isolate the radicals and reverse their
advances. Ironically, women and children are the real hope against the
terror ideology; and it is precisely these two weak segments of society
that the terrorists have been targeting. The questions after Beslan and
all similar horrors are simple: who is providing the “fatwas,” who is
sending the petrodollars and what is the doctrine behind the violence.
Everything else can be figured out when these answers will be provided.
Beslan is perhaps a unifying platform which must be seized promptly by
the main players in international security.
The United States, Britain, France, Russia, and even China have all been
targeted by Salafi Takfiris. The jihadists are aiming at the five
permanent members of the U.N. Security Council as well as India and
major Muslim countries. There cannot be a wider consensus at this stage
of global politics than waging a U.N. campaign against global jihadism.
Way
beyond al-Qaida as an organization, the Security Council must render its
ideology illegal. Let there be discussion of the issue and let clarity
win the day: There should not be room to any violence promising the rise
of empires and totalitarianism, and grounded with ideological
legitimacy. The fascist genocides of the 20th century were enough
reasons not to allow this to happen again. |
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