Split Personality At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

As the White House and the Democratic czars of political correctness lecture us on "watching what we say" in order to avoid Islamophobia and violence against Muslims, the President continues to treat with Russian leader Vladimir Putin through his puppet president Dmitry Medvedev. While Americans commit imaginary "hate crimes" against Muslims, Russian troops and operatives simply cut to the chase and murder Chechen rebel Muslims outright.

My personal view of the situation is that the best result would be that both sides do each other in and thus kill two vicious birds with one stone. But that's an unlikely result, and I'm not the President of the United States who must, Janus-like, have one point of view domestically and an entirely different one of foreign affairs. The Islamic "nation" of Chechnya isn't worth a bucket of warm spit to America, but Russia considers it important only because its lengthy presence within the Russian empire has produced a consensus among Russian leaders that its departure would be a signal to other provinces to seek independence. Unlike Ukraine and other breakaway republics which removed themselves from the former Soviet Union, Chechnya had almost no autonomy or recognition as a state within the Union, and its exit would be considered a breakup of mother Russia herself.

To add to the mix, Chechnya was originally a region that converted to Islam in order to form an alliance with the Ottoman empire to keep out the encroaching Russian Czarist empire. It was a lost cause, and it resulted in a Russian province populated almost entirely by resentful Sunni Muslims. That didn't set well with the Orthodox Christians and even less so with the atheist communist government that ruled after 1919. Today, Chechnya is viewed with the worst suspicions of both former (?) communists and the Russian Orthodox Church. Today's Russia is under the thumb of former President Putin who was also the former head of the ruthless KGB. In neither position did Putin much care about the sensitivities or religious freedom of the Chechens.

Islamic terrorists have given the Kremlin a very bad headache. But as our liberals say, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Our happy-face President can't decide which they are, so he takes no stand at all. Meanwhile, this is a Russian public relations disaster. Revelations seem to be coming out daily about Russian barbarity during both the first and second Chechen wars and the current rebellion. Endangering their own lives, several Russian commanders have admitted that their troops have committed multiple assassinations and mass murder of Chechen rebels. Major Alexei Potyomkin admitted that a group of Red Cross volunteers was slaughtered in Grozny and made to look like the murders were committed by Chechens. A repeat of the murder of Polish officers by the thousands by communist troops at Katyn during WW II which they blamed on the Nazis.

Another Russian officer gave his "war" diary to the London Times which has reproduced it anonymously with its horrific recitation of Russian atrocities in Chechnya during and since 1999. Meanwhile, the Chechens have been busy themselves. In October of this year, rebels attacked the Chechen Parliament building in Grozny at the same time a high-ranking Russian cabinet official was attending a meeting of the Parliament. They have also attempted several near-successful assassinations of the Russian puppet head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. The most recent attempt occurred while Kadyrov was in attendance at a fully-packed theater performance. Attacks are not limited to the capital and its environs. A mass attack by the rebels occurred at a crowded market in Kabardino Balkaria, an outlying area inhabited largely by ethnic Russians.

So why should we care if two opposing gangs are busily killing each other? A couple of reasons. First, it could be a chance for the United States to exploit Russian inability to control its own territories while at the same time making public hay about Russian oppression of Islamic peoples (of course that didn't work out so well in Afghanistan). But at the very least, we would be taking a stand against wholesale slaughter and subjugation of a people's desire for freedom.

Equally importantly is the fact that despite its constant public pronouncements of peace within its border, Russia has either created (or suffered from, depending on your point of view) a massive retaliation by Islamic Chechen rebels that brings instability to the region and danger within Russia itself. This greatly exacerbates the problems the West already faces with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Russian exploitation of Middle East animosities.

Part and parcel of that mess is the fact that the 2014 winter Olympic games will be held in Sochi, Russia. If this situation is not brought under control, the games could make Munich look like child's play. Sochi is far from Moscow, and in the volatile Circassian region which is as close to Chechnya as it is to the Russian capital. There's bad blood there as well since historically, the Russian empire under Alexander II conquered this Caucusus region, subjugating its Muslim population or expelling them to the Ottoman empire. Its peaceful and prosperous tourist popularity obscures the fact that there are ethnic and religious hostilities seething just below the public surface.

Obama owes it to the American public and the Western democracies to expose the Russian atrocities and call attention to the very real potential danger posed by the Chechen rebellion vis-a-vis the Olympic games and more importantly to its athletes and attendees. But considering Obama's tail-between-his-legs obeisance to the Russian bear, it's more likely he will continue to expand his efforts to ferret out the American terrorist Islamophobes who oppose the Ground Zero mosque.