Murder on the Metro

I wanted to write about something other than Islamic terrorism today. I awoke ready to take on the Israelis over Palestine, to look at Barack Obama's latest call for human rights in Cuba, or perhaps just to salute the President over his historic health care plan.

Subsequent events however, or at least my knowledge of them, overtook that idea. The morning then began to unfold with the grimly familiar spectacle played back on television screens of blood-speckled commuters staggering from the smoke-filled subterranean gloom of another underground train line, this time the Moscow Metro.

Most striking perhaps is the way in which the senseless violence of the cowardly and pious perpetrators, (for we can be in no doubt that the culprits will have been pious), is inflicted so indiscriminately. We've seen it on our streets. We see it every time a line of people queuing up to vote in Iraq are blown up, when schools in Afghanistan get burned down, or when, back in 2004, Islamo-fascists decided that the school children of Beslan were ripe for slaughter. After all, they were not Muslim; or at the very least, they were not sufficiently pious. No further justification is required.

What has now become more difficult to sustain is the echo chamber-like invective emanating from those countries who thought they could avoid the Islamist carnage by keeping out of "Muslim lands", only later to find out that the Islamo-fascists wished to impose a Caliphate on some corner of their countries as well. The "root cause" in this outburst of murderous piety appears to be an Islamist group that wishes to establish a Caliphate in the southern tip of Russia. Does anyone still believe that this theological barbarism is appeasable? Are there still those that think a special envoy from the UN development agency needs to be sent to the region to put a caring arm around the militants and "understand them"? Does anybody continue to believe that compromise can be made? That the way to deal with the communities who shelter such people is not a boot to the face so fierce that those responsible will never be able to hit back? Or, to quote Christopher Hitchens, are there those of you, 'the sort who, upon discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals'?

If so, please keep it down will you. At least until the Russian comrades have buried their loved ones.