The New York Times (well, okay, guest contributors Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey) on Muslim religious schools:
While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist.
Feel better now?
We examined the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of the most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a majority of them are college-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering.
So the problem is not with the madrassas, but with Muslim continuing-ed programs?
Nice try.
Remember: Engineering doesn't kill people, but ideology might.
When Bergen and Prandi say:
The tens of millions of dollars spent every year by the United States through the State Department, the Middle East Partnership Initiative, and the Agency for International Development to improve education and literacy in the Middle East and South Asia should be applauded as the development aid it is and not as the counterterrorism effort it cannot be.
They forget that money is fungible (American money for Pakistani textbooks, for example, frees Pakistani money to give bonuses to mullahs).
They also forget that education can be an element of a coherent counterterrorism strategy.
If you're an American out of elementary school who still remembers "You are what you eat," "Be kind to the Earth," "Banned book month," and "Clifford the Big Red Dog," then it's not much of a stretch to wonder about kids who can quote chapter and verse about "infidels," never mind "Zionist conspiracy" and "the Great Satan and the Little Satan."
We should rest easy because, for example, many fifth-graders in Islamic schools haven't yet been taught how to apply algebra (that glorious Muslim invention) to things like Semtex and blast radius equations?
Not as long as there's more to terrorism than technique.
It figures that the NYT doesn't understand this: for them as for Hollywood, even sex is just about technique.
Hat tip to Ace.
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1 comments:
The madrassas may not be creating the leaders, but it sure sounds as if they're creating the necessary followers. Scary, and scary too how resolutely our nation's self-identified top intellectuals close their eyes.
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