unimaginable

I'd had this particular what-if on my mind. Then I found a direct reference to it in the Telegraph from Scott Burgess' blog:

An extremist Islamic cleric based in Britain said yesterday that he would support hostage-taking at British schools if carried out by terrorists with a just cause.

"As long as the Iraqi did not deliberately kill women and children, and they were killed in the crossfire, that would be okay."
Mr Mohammed, 44, who lives in Edmonton, north London, but is originally from Syria, also claimed that the Chechen rebels were not responsible for the deaths of more than 350 people - at least half of them children - who are so far known to have died in Beslan.

"The Mujahideen [Chechen rebels] would not have wanted to kill those people, because it is strictly forbidden as a Muslim to deliberately kill women and children. It is the fault of the Russians," he said.

Those are my bolds.

If it is strictly forbidden to kill women and children, Islamic religious fundamentalism is not the problem. Evil people capable of dishonestly twisting their own "religious" beliefs into justifying breaking every actual law going is the problem.

This man is now apparently being thrown out of the UK. Which for some reason I do not find reassuring at all. I had forgotten about the Chechen school massacre, which I unwisely read all about at the time, and now there are pictures of horror in my head again. Time for another, stricter news blackout, methinks.