Russia mourns and the world with it. The burial of Beslan’s dead, so many and so young, underscores in harrowing scenes of suffering the horror of their premeditated slaughter. The disgusting nature of this crime may tempt outsiders to imagine simplistically that it is unprecedented, unrepeatable and, above all, that it is a specifically Russian phenomenon, inseparable from the subtext of a nationalist rebellion in Chechnya, transformed by brutal mishandling into a jihadist war of terror. Tastelessly and unwisely, this is what the European Union’s foreign ministers implied at the weekend, by appearing to call Russia to account for the tragedy in remarks by the EU presidency, not only echoed but amplified by Romano Prodi, that are now said in Brussels to have been “misunderstood” in Moscow.

The grim truth is that none of these things is true; the sort of attack staged at Beslan could be attempted at any time and anywhere. Russians remember, as most of the world does not, that this is not the first time that Chechen terrorists have singled out the most vulnerable as targets. Nine years ago they seized a hospital in Stavropol, holding pregnant women and babies among their 2,000 hostages in a siege that ended in 100 deaths. In the days preceding their assault on the Beslan school, suicide bombers blew up two passenger aircraft and a Moscow subway station. Their booby-trapping of the gymnasium at Beslan’s School No 1 declared nothing to be beyond the terrorist imagination — and capability.

There is strong evidence that the techniques are inculcated in clandestine or even semi-clandestine centres all the way from Indonesia to northern Africa. Along this arc of violence, explosives training is available and thousands of madrasahs, traditionally centres of quiet religious study, indoctrinate students in the “politics” of the explosive belt. It was never convincing, and it is no longer remotely safe, for the Islamic world’s political and religious leaders to claim that these activities are marginal and alien to their societies and faith, and leave it at that.

Some commentators have had the courage to say so. Writing in the Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat on Saturday, Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the director of the al-Arabiya television network, called on Muslims to “put an end to a history of denial” and recognise that “terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women”. He speaks of “neo-Muslim” radical clerics who have turned a benevolent religion into “a global message of hate”.

It does not help those Muslims brave enough to say candidly that terrorism now has dangerously deep roots in Islamic culture if EU ministers rush to “understand”, where they should without qualification condemn. Their apparent concern to mark a distance from Moscow and Washington is an irrelevance bordering on the irresponsible. What could, by contrast, help is that Russia now seems to seek a fully integrated international response to this challenge.

President Putin insisted on an urgent session of the UN Security Council to pass a resolution on Beslan. This is a striking departure from his previous reluctance to internationalise the Chechen problem. Highly protective of Russia’s sovereign dignity, he has not, until now, sought international assistance. His action opens up a potentially useful avenue for concerting policy with Islamic governments, whose societies are being warped by extremist doctrines and whose citizens, it should be remembered, have suffered terribly at the hands of these terrorists. Moral grandstanding in “old Europe” helped to erode the international solidarity brought to bear after 9/11; the Beslan tragedy could help to reknit that unity. The opportunity must not be thrown away.