Our Hope, Our Children, Our Responsibility in Fighting Jihad

Our Hope, Our Children, Our Responsibility in Fighting Jihad
By
Jeffrey Imm

on September 3, 2008

As children return to schools, we are reminded that they are our hope for the future, but they are also the target of Islamic supremacists around the world. We need to defend the future, hopes, and lives of these children, and assume the "grown-up" duty as responsible adults for defending them from the ideology of Islamic supremacism and Jihadist terrorism.

On September 1, 2004, 770 children were kidnapped by Jihadists in Russia in a small town of Beslan. It was a return to school for these children at Beslan School Number One; the event was celebrated as a "Day of Knowledge," and parents accompanied their children in the joyous return to school. After lining up for photographs to remember the day, children entered the school. So did Jihadists who rushed into Beslan School Number One, while the children were filing into classes. Many of the older children who saw the Jihadists were able to flee. Most of those left behind were the smallest, youngest children, including parents with their babies. Jihadists sought to lure back confused children, uncertain if they should flee, with candy.

Jihadists then forced 1,124 hostages into a small school gymnasium which was wired with explosives in the school's basketball hoop and a dozen other bombs in the Beslan school; they mined the school with grenades, home-made explosives, and landmines, keeping the most powerful bombs in the gym where the children were kidnapped. Some Jihadists also wore explosive suicide vests. They told the children that were going to die. In the small confined space, children suffered from heat and some were forced to strip naked from the heat. Without food and water for three days, some were forced to drink their own urine. The few male adults (including children's fathers) also captured by the Jihadists were forced to build fortifications in the school for the Jihadists; then they shot them and dumped their bodies out a school window. The Jihadists recorded a video of their atrocities (shown in the film "Three Days in September"), laughing and proud of what they had done.

On September 3, 2004, after three days of being terrorized by these Jihadists, 186 of these children were killed, some killed by Jihadist bomb explosions, some shot in the back by Jihadists. Some fled from the schoolhouse streaked with blood as the Jihadist bomb explosions brought the Russian military into a firefight with the Jihadists. Many more children were injured, lost limbs, and were seriously wounded physically and emotionally. By September 4, 2004, children's bodies were lined along the ground outside the Beslan school house, plastic bags covering the bodies, as mothers and fathers sought to find their lost children to know if they were among the dead or wounded evacuated to hospitals. The children had just been going to school. It was a day just like today.

Days after the Beslan atrocities by Jihadists, some believed that the magnitude of the atrocity against helpless children would rouse the sleeping conscience of civilization. The London Times' William Rees-Mogg stated on September 4, 2004 that "Beslan is Russia's 9/11: it will change the world," stating that:

"One must not underestimate the sheer impact of the horror of the event itself. It is something people find very hard to contemplate. The people who planned this massacre are every bit as evil as the people who planned Pearl Harbor or 9/11, or as the SS men who ran Auschwitz. There is a blank horror about what they did to young children which fortunately has few parallels in the history of evil. It is important to hold onto that because the world's sense of horror will influence everything that will follow."

But in fact, the Jihadist atrocity against Beslan's helpless children did not "change the world," or even wake up many of the so-called "foreign policy experts" who live in denial on the ideology of Islamic supremacism. Moreover, the atrocities of Islamic supremacists against children did not end with Beslan. In fact, the denial of such "foreign policy experts" on Jihad only grows more entrenched, and the Islamic supremacist crimes against humanity in perverting, corrupting, and murdering children continue.

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