When They condemn terror

I've noticed an interesting trend.

Known terrorists condemned the 11 September attacks. Yassr Arafat gave blood in a symbolic gesture. Some Arab states offered extensive cooperation in the "war on terror." Pakistan, an old ally of the Taliban, offered some help in the invasion of Afghanistan despite internal threats. In France, thousands marched and declared that "we're all Americans now."

After America invaded Iraq, thousands of heretofore inactive Iraqis joined terrorist movements. A state in the Middle East, which some conservatives believe still has WMD hiding somewhere, has been given a provisional government that relies on a grand ayatollah for stability. Most of the world looks upon America as an imperial power, which was a large part of Usama bin Laden's original stated complaint against the US. Some governments, such as Libya, seem a little happier about cooperating with the United States, but ones considered greater threats, such as Iran and North Korea, have continued in nuclear ambitions. Many Muslims are justifying terrorism against US troops and the interim government on the grounds that it is designed to expel an unjust occupation.

Then, after the attack on the school in Russia this week, here's how some of the Muslim opinion-makers reacted:

"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!". . . .

Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in his column in Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, that hostage-takers in Russia as well as in Iraq are only harming Islam.

"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," Bahgat wrote. . . .

Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said in general, kidnappings may be justified, but killings are not. He said the school siege did not fit the Islamic concept of jihad, or holy war.

"What happened yesterday is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings; it is not about taking them away," Akef told The Associated Press. . . .

"What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?" Egypt's top Muslim cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, was quoted as saying during a Friday sermon in Banha, 30 miles north of Cairo.

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