The other Madrassa

The over simplified claim that the religious Madrassa in Pakistan produces all the evil in the world is fallacy. The students in these schools are from very poor families that send their kids there more for the free food and housing than for religious education, and as the New York Times Magazine reporter who visited these Madrassa found, most students there were more interested in talking with him about sex than religion.  The terrorists who bombed the trade center and London subway lived and got their education from western Madrassa, and not in the Pakistanis Madrassa. As the French sociologist Olivier Roy in his brilliant new book Globalized Islam explained, those Muslim terrorists have been indoctrinated in the western culture; their freelance violence is a reflection of their individual personal beliefs that their values are superior and trump anyone else’s. Schools that are training young men to hate and to kill started here in this country long before the Pakistani Madrassa. Let us get rid of all Madrassa that teach foreigners hate and violence - not just in Pakistan but in the United States Army. The School (Madrassa) of the Americas (SOA), now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), is located on the grounds of Fort Benning, Georgia.  As  Representative Joseph Kennedy says,  “If you look at the course ranges that are offered to these individuals, they, in fact, are a dedicated way of teaching military leaders in foreign nations how to subvert their local communities.  In short, it’s a combat school.  Most of the courses revolve around what they call “counter insurgency warfare,” which refers to the poor in Latin America who call for reform. They are the landless peasants who are hungry.  They are health care workers, human rights advocates, labor organizers, they become the insurgents, they’re seen as “El Enemigo,” or “the Enemy.”  These are the people who become the targets of those who learn their lessons at the School of the Americas.

Empirical research conducted by Katherine E McCoy and titled “Trained to Torture: A Statistical Analysis of Human Rights Violations Committed by Graduates of the US Army School of the Americas, 1960-2000” shows that “soldiers who took two or more courses [at the SOA/WHISC] were almost four times more likely to have committed human-rights violations than soldiers who took one course.” Furthermore, the SOA - which had trained more than 57,000 Latin American soldiers in counter-insurgency techniques, sniper activity, military intelligence, interrogation tactics, commando operations, is a pave of teaching violence and hate as problem solving strategy. In a report by Amnesty International, it pointed out that, apart from the WHISC, the US had “approximately 275 military schools (Madrassa) and installations" that trained “tens of thousands of [foreign] students.”

         Global violence and terrorism is a real threat, make no mistake about it, but our domestic violence is a graver threat to us all.  We don’t see our politicians or media up in arms to curtail gun manufacturers and the NRA; they mostly side with the gun lobby economic security over our own security. More than eleven thousands American are shot and killed by guns in this country every year; every day of the year 13 children are shot to death in the U.S., and none of these involved any Muslim terrorist. Billions of dollars are spent every year around the globe on violence and military training programs, mostly spent by the USA. America has troops in every time zone on earth, and believe me, they are not protecting democracy. They are protecting oil pipes to keep the flow of our fix. If we are serious about ridding the world of global hate and violence, we need to start at home; we need to curtail the rhetoric that demonizes other people because they look different or disagree with our hegemony. Let us stop using the hateful slogans and malicious speeches like our AM radio talk shows and our evangelical Ayatollah’s biblical rapture sermons encapsulated in the latest Rev Pat Robertson assassination call gaff. We need to show the world that we are champions of peace and prosperity. We need to produce and build a global culture of life, not death.  This so-called war on terrorism is not about clashes between civilizations or religions. It is more about a clash of fundamentalism, a clash of zeal and self-righteousness and a clash of parties of god’s claims. The Balkanization of the Middle East that the Bush administration and his neo-conservative allies have been pushing under the rubric of democratization is leading us down a dangerous path. Here is an interesting fact lost in the midst of the Bush administration’s war on terror:  more Muslims have been killed by the so called Muslim terrorists than non-Muslims. And here is another one: Muslim governments have captured and killed more of those so-called Muslim extremists than all other non Muslim governments put together. It is only if we face this fight together that we can finally together proclaim, “Mission accomplished.”

AHMED THARWAT
Producer & Host of the Arab American TV show Belahdan
Airs Sundays on MN Public TV at 10:30pm
952-933-6825