The Madrassa Myth

The New York Times ^ | 6-14-05 | By PETER BERGEN and SWATI PANDEY

[mattyson]

I used to listen to the BBC World Service on short wave during the time of the Afghan civil war which occurred after the Soviets left.

The Taleban were invariably euphemized as "Taleban, the Afghan student movement", as though they were some kind of college fraternity.

taliban literally means 'students'.

[Northern Alliance]

Donald H. Rumsfeld had queried in a leaked memorandum, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

Rummy for president!

[umbagi]

Welcome to FR.

Which Madrassas did you attend?

[backhoe]

Just so you know- here's my position:

Islam, The Alleged Religion of Peace® ( TARP™ )? Click this picture:

No, I am not exaggerating. Click the pic, go to "last," and read backwards.
If you are not informed about this stuff, you will be made sick. If you are informed, you will be made mad, all over again.

[MeekOneGOP]

Yeah, really. And don't forget about the horrors of Abu-GhraibA$$, too.

The horror and torturing by American Troops.

Underwear on their heads - oh, my!

[Jeff Gordon]

[OpusatFR]

"... such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist."

It teaches them to be passive, passionate robots who can be turned into effective suicide bombers having no concept of anything but killing and dying.

It doesn't require technical or linguistic ability to walk into a crowd with a suicide vest or drive a bomb laden car to a destination.

The article reads like some propagandist's dream.

[infocats]

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.

All the fundamentalists need to know is how to strap explosives to their body...nothing more.

[Publius6961]

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.

And PETER BERGEN and SWATI PANDEY know this exactly how?

Are casual visitors or observers allowed to visit randomly?
With sound recorders?

The only benchmark available is the typical madrassa in countries such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and of course, occupied Israel...

Ammo and weapons and hate speech warehouses.

[Darksheare]

It was referring to 'students' as in 'students of the quran', not students as visioned by western thought.
Iran was a 'student' revolution aided by Jimmy carter who swallowed the ayatollahs trot hook line and sinker.
And guess which group sees the most repression in Iran, students.

The Taliban was NOT a 'student movement', it would be more like a group of Jehovah witnesses taking over your county and then imposing what they say is good for you on your life, catch being that they kill you for violating their rules.
(Obviously a far fetched and inaccurate example but it suits the purpose.)

The BBC never calls terrorism or terrorists what they really are, they always euphemise and obfuscate.

[AnnAdoringFan]

The NYT are a bunch a traitors who published information about an ongoing intelligence operations where a terrorist communications operative had been caught and turned by our agents. by publishing the guy's name the NYT WARNED other terrorists in the network to stay away from the sting operation that had been set up.

as far as I'm concerned the NYT has more blood on their hands than Newsweek, by far!

Traitors, Traitors, TRAITORS.

[LS]

So where do all those verbatim sermons come from that we see all the time, where the "parishoners" are urged to kill Jews and Americans? Just our imagination?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Lyford]

One of the clearest examples I've ever seen of "people unclear on the concept..." It warrants a fisking.

Excerpt:

A World Bank-financed study that was published in April raises further doubts about the influence of madrassas in Pakistan, the country where the schools were thought to be the most influential and the most virulently anti-American. Contrary to the numbers cited in the report of the 9/11 commission, and to a blizzard of newspaper reports that 10 percent of Pakistani students study in madrassas, the study's authors found that fewer than 1 percent do so. If correct, this estimate would suggest that there are far more American children being home-schooled than Pakistani boys attending madrassas.

First, that home-school comment is infuriating. There is no reason to throw it in there other than to exploit some perceived prejudice that home-schooling is mysterious and sinister. Inexcusable, as it serves no logical purpose whatsoever in the case that they're trying to make.

But let's follow the information there to its logical conclusion.

Fewer than 1% of Pakistani boys attend madrassas. That could mean several things:

1. The statistic is not actually correct, and there are far more Pakistanis studying at madrassas than the authors think, in which case the statistic is utterly meaningless.
   
2. Pakistan is not representative of other Middle Eastern, or Muslim-majority, countries, such as Saudi Arabia (which produced most of the 9/11 hijackers), in which case the statistic is utterly meaningless.
   
3. Pakistan is representative, in which case madrassa students are significantly over-weighted in their terrorist sample compared to the population in general.

In either the first or second case, the information is useless in proving the point they're trying to make. In the third case, it actually contradicts it. They've told us that only 12% of terrorists attended madrassas. To then turn around and say less than 1% of the general population attends madrassas, that indicates that madrassa students are 12 times more likely to become terrorists than non-madrassa students.

[jordan8]

The author may be correct in the main, but one problem is defining who is a terrorist. Are the individuals who trained in terror camps in Afghanistan and then went on to join the Taleban in its war on its enemies, or moved to, say, Pakistan to commit major or minor acts of terror there, or act as armed enforcers for Islamic fundamentalists terrorists? If you count these minor foot soldiers as terrorists then the percentage of poor and madrassa educated terrorists goes up. In other words there is an element of selection, self-selection and selection by the terrorist leadership, of who has the wherewithal to participate in the big international operations, and it's not surprising that those operations had as participants individuals who were already in place in the West and more likely had a college education. The authors of the study also select who makes the terrorist list, and a goatherd in Pakistan who shoots a heretic in an alley in the territories probably won't make the list.

all attended Western universities And their rhetoric is studded with the anti-Western quasi-Marxism they learned there.

It is once again interesting to contrast the warm, welcoming attitude the left has towards Islam, standing up for madrassas, welcoming mass Muslim immigration, etc., despite the fact that Islam is opposed to virtually everything they hold dear, with the open hostility they have toward fundamentalist Christians. You'd never see a NYT article giving Bob Jones University the sort of pat on the back they here give the madrassas. Howard Dean's recent remarks about white, Christian, Republicans wasn't meant to be positive. So what is it about Islam that makes them stick up for it? Islam is not Western, and overwhelmingly not white, and the enemy of my enemies is my friend to these fanatics (who are the real deadly religious cult) even if it means their own destruction in the end.

[bitt]

nice .gif - I stole it.

[Jeff Gordon]

nice .gif - I stole it.

The gif is not mine. It is on the FaithFreedom web site server. If you like the gif, you will love the FaithFreedom site. Check out their member forum while your are there.

http://www.faithfreedom.org/

[bitt]

thanks.