Basayev: death was not enough

Mark Trodden at Cosmic Variance celebrates that the BBC conjectured that the terrorists and their buddies at Guantanamo Bay will enjoy increased luxury in their lives. As you can imagine, your humble correspondent celebrates very different things, and in some sense the very opposite things than Mark Trodden does.

Ladies and Gentlemen, most of you have probably heard that Shamil Basayev is dead. The Russian president correctly says that death is not enough for such a monster. Well, Basayev is responsible for hundreds of deaths - 300+ people in the school at Beslan, the Moscow theater siege etc. - which are thousands of times more valuable than his life.

There are other reasons to be happy that this Islamic terrorist has joined his buddy al-Zarqawi. Basayev thought that Osama bin Laden had to be a great person because his face always emits light on all photographs. Moreover, Basayev was obsessed with the very same human garbage as some of our liberal friends - namely with the communist terrorist Che Guevara. ;-)

We may be cautious about Russia in many subtle cases and we can also sympathize with many nations whose independence was suppressed by the Russian bear, but in this particular case, all good people should admit that the Chechen Islamic terrorism affecting Russia is completely analogous to the Islamic fundamentalist terrorism directed against America and other Western countries. Basayev's death is not a sufficient punishment but it is still a good news.

I wonder whether the explosion was a result of a good work of the Russian intelligence forces or whether it was a genuine accident. It is likely that we won't ever learn the answer, and if we learn it, it will not necessarily be the correct answer because of the intense propaganda war in the background.