Officials in Burinlington Township held a mock hostage crisis a couple weeks ago to prepare police and school employees for the worst.

“You perform as you practice,” Superintendent Chris Manno said prior to the exercise. “We need to practice under conditions as real as possible in order to evaluate our procedures and plans so that they're as effective as possible.”

How did these officials make it "as real as possible?"

The mock terror attack involved two irate men armed with handguns who invaded the high school through the front door. They pretended to shoot several students in the hallway and then barricaded themselves in the media center with 10 student hostages.

Two Burlington Township police detectives portrayed the gunmen. Investigators described them as members of a right-wing fundamentalist group called the “New Crusaders” who don't believe in separation of church and state. The mock gunmen went to the school seeking justice because the daughter of one had been expelled for praying before class.

This is stupid on so many levels.

First, schools can't expel kids for praying before, during or after class. If this had happened, the kid's parents would've shown up with lawyers, not guns.

School officials have defended their mock scenario by pointing out that it never explicitly says "Christians" were the terrorists in this case. Is this seriously how they're teaching kids? "New Crusaders" doesn't scream "Christian" only if you're totally ignorant of history. Does anyone seriously believe that the folks over at CAIR would shrug their shoulders and walk away if the terrorists had been described as the "New Jihadis" -- but they never specifically said "Muslim" or "Islam"?

Making this scenario "realistic" -- for which any backstory is really unnecessary -- would require Muslim terrorists. But CAIR and its ilk would scream.

Halfway across the world, Muslims are screaming about plans to build a church as a memorial on the grounds of the Beslan school where 333 hostages were murdered by Islamic terrorists.

The sad thing is that Reuters news agency still doesn't have the guts to call a spade a spade.

The local Russian Orthodox diocese says it will build a church in the grounds of Beslan's school No. 1 to commemorate the victims -- half of them children -- killed in a clash between insurgents and Russian troops. [emphasis added]

Yeah, because the schoolchildren just happened to be in the middle of a firefight, and not the targets of a hostage-taking.