It’s time to stop calling the global terrorists Islamic fundamentalists.

The slaughter of the Russian children in Beslan has absolutely nothing to do with Islam. If the Islamic community does not rise up en masse against the fanatics who dare to use the name of Allah while committing these atrocities, they need to stop insisting Islam is a religion of peace.

New Yorkers care about the homeless, animal rights, and other causes, but what about children dying unless it’s our own? I was curious to see how large the turnout would be for a hastily organized vigil scheduled for last Saturday night in front of the Russian Consulate on 91st near Fifth Avenue.

Earlier that day I was glued to the television set searching in vain for news from Russia about the massacre. Updates on the massacre were sporadic. The latest news at that time was an unconfirmed death toll of 337, with 155 children among the dead. Another 237 children were wounded. Horrible!

Flowers and candles from sympathetic New Yorkers had been placed in front of the consulate’s gates. Priests from the nearby Russian Orthodox church of St. Nicholas came by with several parishioners and sang a hymn for those slaughtered innocents. Unfortunately, few people attended the vigil.

I spoke later with Nicholas Arena, a Manhattan trial lawyer who had spent a year in Russia in 1995 and 1996 teaching the rule of law all over the country.

“This is a great tragedy but in some ways, it is a wakeup call,” Mr. Arena said. “It’s time for Russia and the United States to put away the chessboard. Enough with this business about who’s making the next move! We have a common enemy and need to come together to fight it. What a blow that would be to the morale of the terrorists who have enjoyed seeing Russia and the U.S. go off in different directions.”

The Koran specifically forbids the killing of innocents and calls for the beheading of those who do, but Muslims are barred from single-handedly interpreting the meaning of the Koran. Only a community of clerics and Islamic scholars can determine this. The main stream community is said to be against unprovoked violence, but consider what one extremist in Britain has declared.

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph in London, Omar Bakri Mohammed, leader of the extremist sect al-Muhajiroun, said holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule.

When asked his opinion about the Beslan massacre, he said “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.”

Frankly, I’m up to here with fanatics who preach hatred and make martyrs out of children by slapping bombs on them or strafing them as they try to escape-all in the name of religion.

If you are a Muslim and can excuse what happened in Beslan as the fault of the Russians or if you blame Israel for the suicide bombers, then either there is something wrong with you or your religion has been hijacked. The world has tired of the silence of the Muslim community. Allah had nothing to do with Beslan but surely Satan did.

How long will Americans care about this tragedy? Four years ago, I wrote a column about what was happening to the children in the Sudan. I repeated a quote that Nat Hentoff had used in his great column, “Slaughter of the Innocents.”

Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, said on September 15, 1999, “The human rights situation in Sudan is not marketable to the American people.” Apparently she was right, because in February 2000, the Islamic Sudanese government bombed a Catholic grade school killing over 18 kindergartners and wounding scores of others.

Now politicians and Hollywood celebrities are getting arrested protesting the Sudan Embassy over the deaths of the rebels in Darfur. Columnists are calling for our government to do something about the genocide in the Sudan, but where were they four years ago? Oh I forgot, Bush wasn’t in office in 2000.

The children in Beslan were white; in the Sudan the children were black, but all of their blood ran red and they were all killed by those claiming to be Muslims.

Many Americans believe we are in a religious war. Only the Muslim community denouncing these murdering fanatics can prove them wrong.