Oklahoman Victim in Moscow

Very sadly, an Oklahoman was the American hostage killed in the Moscow theatre when Russian troops tried to rescue hostages held by Chechens. The family of Sandy Booker was notified this morning that his body was identified as one of the more than 100 killed in the siege. The Daily Oklahoman reports that Sandy Booker had gone to Moscow to see his Russian-Kazakh fiance and her child and was in the theatre when Chechen terrorists took it over and demanded that Russian troops leave the breakaway region of Chechnya. Wire reports indicate most of the hostages died from a powerful mysterious gas used during Saturday morning's raid of the theater. Russian troops have been criticized for using a gas that they refused to identify to doctors who needed to treat the hostages felled by the gas.

Mr. Booker worked for 18 years as an electrician at the General Motors Plant in Oklahoma City. The Daily Oklahoman reports that workers at the Oklahoma City plant continued Monday to wear red, white and blue ribbons in support of Sandy Booker and his family.

118 innocent hostages died in the tragedy. 50 of 54 terrorists were killed by the Russian troops. The Russian troops may or may not be found to have made serious errors in their attempt to end the hostage situation but the Chechen terrorists who organized and instigated the hostage taking are the ones who bear direct responsibility for the heinous crime against innocent people. If they were planning on world sympathy for their cause they failed miserably.

My heart goes out to the family of Sandy Booker and to all the others who lost loved ones in this senseless crime.

What's going on?

Yulia Latynina, a Russian journalist, has an interesting viewpoint on how the Moscow tragedy fits into a bigger picture:

President Vladimir Putin kept his word and wasted the terrorists. Not in the outhouse as promised, it's true, but in the orchestra pit. The West expressed its support. The reason for this support was the West's unexpected discovery that it is waging a third world war against Islamic extremism. In that war, just as in World War II, wild and rather uncivilized Russia turns out to be an ally. I have no intention of indiscriminately knocking Islam, but for some reason we haven't seen Shintoist terrorists. The snipers captured in Washington had accepted Islam, not Buddhism.