‘Criminals, Not Muslims’

The criminals who took children hostage at their school on the first day of classes and are responsible for the deaths of at least 335 people in Beslan, Russia, have generated universal condemnation. The sickening pictures of row upon row of corpses, many of them grammar school students, provoked Muslim leaders to excoriate the terrorists and declare that the perpetrators did not act in the name of their religion.

Egypt’s top cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, said during prayers Friday that “those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims.”

At a Moscow rally of more than 100,000 on Tuesday, a leading Muslim said the terrorists, thought to be men and women from the predominantly Muslim republic of Chechnya, were “not Muslims ... not humans.”

Atrocities in Iraq, like the beheading or shooting of 12 Nepalese workers by a group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq, which showed the killings on its website last week, also have created revulsion inside and outside the Muslim world. Some prominent Arabs, appalled by the Russian deaths, suggested that autocratic Mideast governments, plagued by corruption and claiming to be Islamic, have become breeders of terrorists. That’s an opinion rarely heard in the censored press of the Middle East but familiar in the United States.

What happened in Beslan was far more horrible than a “hostage-taking,” being a terror act aimed specifically at children. But governments fighting such assaults need to know what leads to the crimes and find out if there’s a way to drain the swamps that produce them. Chechens appalled at the seizure of children last week also were angered when, during the school siege, Russian soldiers in Chechnya took as captives children and elderly people related to Chechen rebel leaders. Also, the threat by Russia’s top general Wednesday to strike terrorists “in any region of the world” will trouble neighboring Georgia, where Chechens are alleged to hide, and nations like Qatar, where two Russian agents were convicted in June for the car bombing that killed a Chechen rebel leader.

Tuesday’s Moscow rally turned into a demonstration favoring President Vladimir V. Putin, who has promised to crack down on terror. In addition, the rally produced ominous racist comments that darker-skinned people should be driven from the Russian capital.

Putin should denounce those sentiments and, as President Bush did after Sept. 11, separate Islam and the overwhelming majority of its adherents from fanatics who wreak havoc in the name of religion.

Russians should recognize that the Beslan tragedy has moved people around the world to donate to the city and to join in the mourning. Yet such goodwill can be squandered if Russians succumb to racism and the desire for mindless revenge.