The Madrassa Myth

Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey editorialized in NYT It is one of the widespread assumptions of the war on terrorism that the Muslim religious schools known as madrassas, catering to families that are often poor, are graduating students who become terrorists. Last year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell denounced madrassas in Pakistan and several other countries as breeding grounds for "fundamentalists and terrorists." A year earlier, Secretary of Defense 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?"

I would believe those two before I would believe two people I never heard of before from New America Foundation (which I also never heard of before).

While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote,

Do they teach the entire Koran, or just selected portions, and what version of the Koran?

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

No there are other training camps for that, once they have been brainwashed to believe that their path to Paradise is through killing Americans.

Indeed, there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West. And as a matter of national security, the United States doesn't need to worry about Muslim fundamentalists with whom we may disagree

A Christian Fundamentalist may yell at someone that does not believe as he does, and a Jewish Fundamentalist may ignore someone that does not believe as he does, but Muslim fundamentalist wants to kill everyone that does not believe as he does.

, but about terrorists who want to attack us.

K. J. Lopez blogged It's just hate, don't worry. I'm sure lessons in glad anti-American fundamentalist hate would never sow the seeds for terrorism

Orrin Judd blogged Then how do we blame the Sa'uds?