"The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!"

In unusual introspective and forthright self criticism, Muslim leaders have denounced the actions of the Russian school siege evil doers.

The Associated Press reports that Muslim leaders are concerned that such actions inflict damage to the image of Islam and denounced the school seizure as unjustifiable.

Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television:

"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 pan-Arab 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, the Saudi-born leader of the al-Qaida terror network.

"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims," he wrote. Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless "we admit the scandalous facts," rather than offer condemnations or justifications. The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us," al-Rashed wrote."

Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper:

"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 stdity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age," Bahgat wrote. ' The horrifying images of the dead and wounded Russian students "showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families."

Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, Egypt's top Muslim cleric:

"What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?"

"You are taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnapings 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.

While it is hopeful to see that Muslim opinion makers have finally seen an evil act perpetrated against innocent victims that went too far. These Muslim leaders haven't even begun to express enough outrage to satisfy me. Unfortunately, their main concern is only Islam's image.

Comments

[Danny Adams]

I totally agree with your thoughts. The overriding concern of these people is not with the suffering of the innocent children but the image of Islam! Islam is a brutal religion used by evil scum who are a threat the the west! It's time we stopped messing about and went on the extreme offensive. fuck civil liberties at this time, its a wartime situation and our whole way of life depends on defeating these people!

[Lee Grey]

While there's something gratifying about these comments, I doubt it will sway the evil losers bent on destroying anything good or positive in the world. I just don't think reason and persuasion will be effective with people who are so filled with hate.

Sorry to be so negative, but I just can't see any hope of changing the tiny minds of people who have no qualms about killing innocent children, sending their own children to blow themselves up on a bus full of civilians, or who cheer and shoot rifles in the air when thousands of innocent people are killed in office buildings.

Do you think it's possible to carry on a reasonable conversation with someone like that? Do you think their minds could be changed?