Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
CAIRO - Images of dead, wounded and traumatized Russian children being carried from the scene of a rebel school siege horrified Arabs, prompting forthright self-criticism Saturday and fresh concern about an international backlash against Islam and its followers.
Arab leaders, Muslim clerics and ordinary parents across the Middle East denounced the school siege that left more than 330 people dead, many of them children, as unjustifiable.
Some warned such actions damage Islam's image more than all its enemies could hope. Even some supporters of Islamic militancy condemned it, though at least one insisted Muslims were not behind it.
The terrorists were reportedly demanding the independence of the mostly Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya - a cause embraced by Arab Islamists. "Holy warriors" from the Middle East long have supported Chechen fighters, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed when commandos stormed the Beslan school in southern Russia on Friday.
The nationalities of the Arabs among the dead terrorists was not known. However, a prominent Arab journalist wrote that Muslims must acknowledge the painful fact that Muslims are the main perpetrators of terrorism.
"Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television, wrote in his daily column published in the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. It ran under the headline, "The painful truth: All the world terrorists are Muslims!"
Al-Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups - in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen - many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaida.
Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist and columnist for Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, wrote, "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."
Other Islamists were more cautious in their criticism.
Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said the siege did not fit the Islamic concept of jihad, or holy war, but took care not to characterize it as terrorism.
"What happened . . . is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings," Akef said. "Real jihad should target occupiers of our lands only, like the Palestinian and Iraqi resistance."