An average person stumbling across this article might be a little surprised, because the mainstream media has effectively hidden the most important facts about the Russian school siege from the public, but the Islamic terrorists the media identifies as “Chechen rebels” are working to impose an Islamic state and shari’a law on the region: Chechen Rebels Want Own Muslim State, Laws.

Although most Chechens are Muslim, Aslan Maskhadov, who became president of Chechnya after Russian forces withdrew in 1996, was seen as relatively secular. However, he came under increasing pressure from radical Islamic factions led by warlord Shamil Basayev and eventually declared Sharia law, or Islamic law, an idea that has less support among the public at large than it does among the rebels.

Basayev was a leader of the Chechen insurgents who mounted a raid into neighboring Dagestan in 1999 with the aim of establishing an Islamic theocratic enclave. That raid was one of the Kremlin’s justifications for trying to forcefully regain control of Chechnya and touched off the current conflict.

Maskhadov, despite tensions with Basayev, opposed Russia’s offensive. Although he is believed to still hold some fighters’ loyalty, those who answer to Basayev are believed to be a far larger and more violent contingent.

Their method to achieve this utopian Islamic state? The mass murder of children.

The death toll after Friday’s bloody climax to the two-day siege included 155 school children, many of them held inside a gym by their captors, and confirmed the episode as the grimmest hostage-taking of modern times.

Officials confirmed for the first time media reports that the separatists had taken more than 1,000 people hostage when they stormed into the school on Wednesday.

A total of 26 militants, 10 of them Arabs according to Russian officials, had staged the hostage seizure, said Deputy Prosecutor-General Sergei Fridinsky. All had been killed.

“As a result of the terrorist acts, 322 people were killed, 155 of whom were children … I think the death toll will rise, but probably not very much,” Fridinsky said.

Has anyone heard a a single Islamic leader, anywhere in the world, condemn this bloody savagery committed in the name of their religion?

The silence is deafening.

UPDATE at 9/4/04 7:32:21 am:

LGF reader Zakwhich points out an article at the Jerusalem Post with the headline: Siege prompts self-criticism in Arab media. But once again, the “self-criticism” on display is about a micron deep. The main objection expressed by (a few) Arab journalists is that the mass murder of children harms Islam’s image.

Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in his column in Egypt’s leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, that hostage-takers in Russia as well as in Iraq are only harming Islam.

“If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it … they wouldn’t have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age,” Bahgat wrote.

Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the head of al-Azhar University in Egypt, who has previously issued calls for jihad against the West and praised suicide bombers, falls back on the other tactic frequently used to deny blame: the child killers were not really Muslims.

“What is the guilt of those children (in Russia)? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?” Egypt’s top Muslim cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, was quoted as saying during a Friday sermon in Banha, 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Cairo.

“You are taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims,” Tantawi, who heads Al-Azhar University, the highest authority in the Sunni Islamic world, was quoted by Egypt’s Middle East News agency as saying.