
The Beslan school siege (also referred to as the Beslan school hostage crisis or the Beslan massacre) was an Islamic terrorist attack that started on 1 September 2004. It lasted three days, and involved the imprisonment of more than 1,100 people as hostages, (including 777 children) ending with the deaths of 334 people, 186 of them children, as well as 31 of the attackers. It is considered one of the largest school shootings / massacres in history.
David Brooks, in a NY Times Op-Ed piece after the massacre, in 2016, wrote the following about the Muslim terrorists:
We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don’t want to stare into this abyss. We don’t want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.
It should come as no surprise to me — yet it still does — that people have any confidence remaining in idea of the “essential goodness of human beings.” Yet this is perhaps one of the most durable myths of our modern secular age. It underlies both public policy and private perception, and forms the basis of many failed government and social programs. If you have the stomach for it and the honesty to look objectively, even a brief glance at human history both ancient and modern reveals vastly more evidence of the depravity of man than his essential goodness. Consider briefly the following examples: the Inquisition, slavery, Ghengis Kahn, the Holocaust, the einsatzgrupen, the Bataan Death March, the Cambodian killing fields, Rwanda, Idi Amin, Columbine, Saddam’s rape rooms and shredders, suicide bombers on school buses and in pizza parlors, the rape of Nanking, the gulags, and Wounded Knee. And these are only the large historical events, easy to bring to mind. Left unmentioned but vastly outnumbering these are the countless murders, rapes, child molesters, serial killings, drug dealing, and any number of other smaller — but still profoundly evil — events which now barely if ever make the news.