Afghan President Hamid Karzai urges the international community to put an end to Islamic schools that teach hatred and produce suicide bombers:
Madrassas, or Islamic schools, are "teaching hatred rather than religion, (teaching) that some people we must hate, that some people we must destroy," Karzai said at a public luncheon in Montreal.The Afghan president said it "will take a lot of sacrifice from Afghans, and from the rest of the world ... to get rid of those places who in the name of madrassas, in the name of religious schools, are teaching hatred to young people and sending them against us, who are actually training suicide bombers against us."
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In an interview published Saturday in the national Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, Karzai said that Pakistan, Afghanistan's neighbor, must find the political will to eliminate its breeding grounds of terrorism if Afghanistan is to know peace.
No one knows how many madrassas exist in Pakistan. Estimates range up to 30,000. Many are peaceable institutions serving only to train devout Muslims. But others indoctrinate students in holy war and are openly jihadi enlistment centers. Pakistan must shut down these hate factories.
In November 2003, Newsweek carried an article about the Pakistani madrassas. The article points out a number of the difficulties with trying to stop the madrassas' hate teachings. One example is the Jamia Uloom Islamia religious academy, the only formal schooling most of its students will ever have. The students there learn civics from a white-bearded scholar named Amanullah, 65, who teaches them about the Taliban:
"There was a real Islamic regime," the old man says. "They fixed 25 years of problems in no time, using Islamic laws."
Another faculty member at Jamia Uloom Islamia, Mullah Taj Mohammad, teaches current-events, warning of the evils that lurk in non-Islamic lands:
"I've heard that many Muslim girls have infidel boyfriends--and clink glasses of alcohol with Jews." That's not the worst of it, he says: "Americans are killing Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they are busy trying to poison Muslim minds everywhere with films, music and television."
Madrassas like Jamia Uloom Islamia, are where many Taliban leaders got their start two decades ago during the CIA's war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Such hate factories continue to indoctrinate new holy warriors to serve radical Islam.
More than four years ago Pakistan's leader, General Musharraf, promised to control the madrassas. He made some efforts, closing down dozens of madrassas run by banned groups. The Musharraf government also issued new regulations on religious schools controlling the curriculum by ban the teaching of sectarian hatred and violence and mandating teaching secular subjects such as English and computer science. More must be done.
As Mark Steyn has written, in the 1990s, while the world's leaders slept – or in Bill Clinton's case slept around – Wealthy Saudis – including members of the royal family – invested millions in setting up mosques and madrassas in what were traditionally spheres of a more accommodationist Islam, from the Balkans to South Asia, and successfully radicalized a generation of young Muslim men.
It is past the time for us to support President Karzai's call for Pakistan do more to end the hate factories.
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