THEY WAR ON CHILDREN, AND CALL IT HOLY

August 7, 2002 --

Radical Islam revealed its murderous nature again this week when four gunmen attacked a Christian school in Murree, Pakistan.

They slaughtered five school employees and a bystander - but failed to reach their main target: the school's children, who took refuge behind stout doors.

That's right: Children!

The Monday attack echoed the Punjab massacre last October, when 15 Pakistani Christians were butchered inside a church.

And it was immediately followed by an assault that killed nine Hindu pilgrims in Indian Kashmir.

October's massacre was met with silence from Islamic leaders, in America and around the world.

So, too, the latest slaughters.

What do the perfidious princes of Saudi Arabia (who fund extremist Wahabi missions everywhere that Muslims can be found) have to say?

As usual, the silence is deafening.

The plain fact is that fundamentalist Muslim intolerance of other faiths is the deadliest, most destabilizing force in the world today.

Quite apart from the horrors of al Qaeda's attacks on America, it manifests itself in a bloodsoaked pattern of persecution and terror in countries as far apart as Indonesia - where the Laskar Jihad movement has massacred some 5,000 Christians over the last three years - and Sudan, where the (mostly Arab) Muslims of the North enslave women and children from the (mostly black) Christian and animist South.

And though it isn't something you hear about much, Filipino Catholics, Coptic Christians in Egypt, members of the Bahai faith in Iran and even Trappist monks in Algeria have all felt the edge of the Islamic fundamentalist sword.

In Pakistan on Monday, the fanatics who wanted to slaughter more than a hundred Christian schoolchildren escaped to kill another day.

Children!

And the silence maintains.