The Education War ─ Abolish Fanatical Madrassas

America has to lead the “education war” to teach, advocate and promote democracy and the ideals of the Founding Fathers globally. Especially in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. America must teach the benefits of a constitutional secular democracy as practiced in Turkey, Indonesia and India. Although secularism is losing ground in Indonesia’s new democracy to mobs manipulated by Islamic fundamentalists.

These are countries that have avoided, for the most part, extreme Muslim terrorists because of their secular democratic institutions. India, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, is also the world’s largest democracy ─ a thriving secular democracy at that. When compared to neighboring Pakistan, with a smaller Muslim population that educates its children in religious madrasses, the contrast in economic and political development between a secular democratic education and a religious totalitarian education become self-evident.

Madrassas are a hotbed of extremism in Pakistan and Indonesia and must be abolished.

Indonesia is a case study of mosques or schools built and paid for by Saudi Arabia. All the terrorists involved in the Bali nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people in 2003 and 2005 Marriot hotel bombing in Jakarta, were graduates of pesantrens, private Islamic boarding schools. The Al-Mukmin, a pesantren situated in the sleepy village of Ngruki on the outskirts of Solo city is a no frills spartan institution that instills a sense of rigid austerity in 10-16 year olds, seven days a week for most of the year.

In Pakistan, there are more than 10,000 madrassas and they educate an estimated 1.7 million students, while public school enrollment is some 25 million. Most madrassas are still unregistered, their finances unregulated and the government has yet to remove the holy warrior and sectarian content from their curriculum. The standoff in the late spring of 2007 in Islamabad at the Red Mosque, the city’s oldest mosque, between clerics who want to topple the government and army reflects just how widely religious extremism has become. The army will remain in control. President General Pervez Musharraf won’t the minute the army abandons him for its own political survival. Pakistan’s three previous military rulers exited from power under unhappy circumstances, which does not bode well for Musharraf.

Pakistan did deport 1,400 foreign madrassa students and vowed to add science, math and other academic subjects to the schools’ almost wholly religious curriculum, which Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s military dictator, said contributed to a “jihadi culture” in Pakistan. Sounds like the only people who can add up in Pakistan are the military and they learn that at Sandhurst, the elite British college.

Serving for centuries as a main source of learning in Islamic countries, madrassas mushroomed in Pakistan during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Funded by Saudi money and backed by the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, many of these madrassas were turned into recruitment centers for producing thousands of foot soldiers to fight the Russians in Afghanistan and later, the Indian security forces in Kashmir, and now in India itself as the bombings in New Delhi and Mumbai demonstrated, and the U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The teachers at the madrassas reject democracy because it subjects the will of God to popular opinion. Yet for terrorism to be eradicated, its supply of fanatically trained religious extremist foot soldiers has to be stopped and the existing ones have to be able to participate in fair and open democratic elections, so that their anger and frustration can be vented through peaceful means.

Extremists

Damascus and Tehran’s ties to the extremists at both ends of the Sunni and Shiite political spectrum are responsible for the destructive collision course they are on not just in Iraq, but Palestine. Let’s not forget who Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas spoke to by phone, to explore ways of ending the Palestinian conflict because of the Gaza “madness.” Exiled Hamas political supremo Khaled Meshaal, who is living in Damascus. Iran and Syria are key players to the elusive peaceful puzzle ─ partition. America has to stop paying tribute to American soldiers in Iraq as their death tolls hit 3,000 and most recently 3,500 and the next milestones of death. It is time for Congress to come up with a realistic timeline and plan ─ partition. All other plans, military and political, have failed. What other option is there? The solution to peace in the Middle East, starting in Iraq and Palestine is partition.

The five-year plan for Iraq adopted by the leaders of the 50 countries that gathered in Egypt in May 2007, aimed at rescuing war-ravaged Iraq from chaos and bankruptcy will, like the rest of the plans, fail because the main aim of the so-called “International Compact” is to rebuild a unified federal Iraq. The only part of the plan that has any hope of survival is the oil revenue-sharing plan ─ but in a partitioned Iraq. Setting withdrawal plans without a partition plan is another mistake future generations will pay for ─ emotionally, politically and financially.

Islamistan

Hamas refusal to renounce violence and acknowledge the sovereignty of Israel has resulted in the de-facto partition of what was to be the state of Palestine ─ Gaza and the West Bank a territory long troubled by complex clan rivalries. Gaza is now embracing its 1.4 million lost true Palestinian wandering tribe, albeit a lot more religious and extremist than its founders in pre-Roman times. Today, the impoverished coastal strip is Islamic and extremist to the core. It is an Iranian-backed terrorist state, not much different than North Korea, but thankfully without nuclear weapons. There is no way in the foreseeable future that Hamas and Fatah will see eye to eye. So let’s cut to the chase ─ partition. Hamas is supported financially and militarily by Iran and Syria. Gaza can be Islamistan, Palestine or some combination thereof. America and its allies should stop trying to isolate Hamas while they support Fatah. It can and should support both.
The West Bank on the other hand, is a lot more secular and politically moderate. A quarter of the more than two million Palestinians living there are refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israel war. In Gaza two thirds of the residents are refugees of the war.

The West Bank could easily interlocalise with either Jordan or Israel as a partner in a federated state. Israel and Jordan can both use its 50,000 armed forces to combat the 6,000 force that Hamas fields.

The failure of the Saudi initiated Mecca-accord, signed by Hamas and Fatah in February 2007, to last more than 90 days is a good hint that their power-sharing idea is a non-starter. The power-sharing idea agreed in Mecca was in order to avert a looming civil war and ease an international blockade on the previous all-Hamas government. Neither ambition has been achieved.

Partition the Only Solution for Iraq and Palestine

The futility of the U.S. policy of a united democratic Iraq and Palestine is best expressed by the story of Khamael Muhsen and her husband Mohammed Sadiq Falhee. Khamael was a reporter with Radio Free Europe, the U.S. government-funded broadcaster who was killed for being a reporter and a Shiite in the middle of the Baghdad security plan that the Bush administration claimed was making the city safer. She had been a TV personality in Saddam Hussein’s era. The 54-year old Khamael became one of those statistical bodies dumped on the side of the road like garbage ─ one of at least 158 journalists, most of them Iraqis, who’ve been killed since the U.S. led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In Iraq and Palestine, if a mobile phone is switched off for an hour or more that means the phone owner is dead. That is how Mohammed knew she had been murdered. “If you say you’ll be home at five and it is six, you are dead,” he said. They had met and fallen in love during the first Gulf War after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1991. He’d helped her with her broken-down car during an air raid. He saw her again in a flower shop. This time, her mobile phone wasn’t working. He helped her fix it, and she asked him why he wasn’t married. He jokingly asked her if she’d marry him. She said yes.

Khamael and her husband Mohammed were Shiite Muslims and targets for Sunni extremists in their al-Qaeda controlled neighborhood. She said it would just be a matter of time before the Sunni extremists would take her life. They sent their two teenage daughters to live in Syria. At school in Baghdad the girls were called separationists and Safawis, the Arabic word for the Persian Safavid Empire, and now a common label for Shiites that implies they are part of an Iranian conspiracy to take over Arab Iraq. But Khamael was determined. She would not be forced out of her home and her neighborhood just because she was a Shiite.

Khamael’s body was found with a drill hole and bullet wounds on each side of her head and a cracked skull. She’d duck out after curfews for a story when only insurgents, militias and security forces roamed the streets. She hated those that killed in the name of Islam.