Blogger Neo-Neocon has a thoughtful take on the way the media covered the anniversary of the massacre of children in Beslan. Obviously, there’s the fact that reporters go out of their way to avoid using the word “terrorist” to describe the perpetrators of the attack — instead, we are told that “militants” or “rebels” were responsible for the torture and murder of these kids. But NNC notices something else about the coverage:

There’s even more that’s interesting about the Beslan articles. It seems as though Russia and the US are not so different after all, these days, in people’s tendency to focus on the actions (or inactions) of their own governments. A close reading of this article is fascinating for the parallels it demonstrates: the emphasis on the blaming of the authorities for their failure to protect rather than of the terrorists for the murders themselves, the vociferous demands of the victims’ families for a confrontation with Putin, and the callous and opportunistic use the terrorists make of the controversy to score their own propaganda points through the clever manipulation of public opinion to deflect all accusations even further in the direction of the government.
It’s mystifying to me why this particular act, so unequivocally evil (yes, I’ll use the word), seems sometimes to have been transmuted into just another opportunity to blame the government. As with many things–9/11, the Katrina disaster–there is no doubt plenty of blame to go around, and many errors that were made by the authorities. But these errors are more in the nature of contributory negligence at worst, and inevitable and unavoidable human failings at best.
The true perpetrators here must not be forgotten: cold-blooded and manipulative terrorists who were out to murder the largest possible number of children in the most painful way possible, making them suffer first for several unspeakable days. It’s almost as though the truth of Beslan is so horrific that people feel they must close their eyes to it or go mad. It’s an example of that tried and true defense mechanism, displacement. How much safer to rage against the imperfect and seemingly impotent governments than at the perfectly malignant and all-too-active terrorists.