From one of the pieces I excerpted in the post immediately previous to this one comes the following:
By targeting children, the hostage takers appeared to have opened a new chapter in terrorism, setting a precedent that could have implications far beyond Russia's borders.It may be true in one sense that the murderers of Beslan have opened a new chapter. But in another sense it is in the nature of mass terror just as such that it targets children. Since it doesn't respect the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, since those who purvey it are willing to treat anyone at all who is in the wrong place at the wrong time - civilians at random, human beings - as merely the dispensable materials for delivering a message they have to convey, it follows that children are not to be spared by it. I do not diminish the horror of what was done in Beslan by those who made a school and its children the particular focus of this criminality; nothing, ever, can reduce it. But the logic of the kind of terrorism the world now faces - as we have known for a certainty since September 11 2001 (all those willing to look at what is before them and not make miserable apology for it) - is that it will observe no moral limit. The killers over the skies of Manhattan, the bombers in Bali, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Madrid, have no care or scruple for the lives of innocents, children or other. At the cost of repeating myself: these are enemies of all humankind.