It was the most important thing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in months about the future of terrorism, and it didn’t even make the news in this country.
In an interview with the BBC on March 16, Rumsfeld said that his administration didn’t know how many children were being recruited by the tens of thousands of radical Islamic indoctrination schools called madrasas known to exist in at least 30 countries worldwide. And it doesn’t know how to deal with them.
Almost every known Islamic terrorist who has blown something up in the last two and a half years was indoctrinated in these schools in the 1980s and 1990s. The difference is that back then, there were only a few thousand of these schools, most of them in Saudi Arabia. Today the estimated number of these schools across the globe exceeds 50,000, including those in South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and in many of the former Soviet republics. That number increases every day, thanks to a seemingly endless flow of Saudi oil money. Yet in most American news reports on this subject, the problem doesn’t even merit a mention.
With the exception of the Los Angeles Times, the American media just doesn’t get it when it comes to terrorism. They think what politicians want them to think, which is that if we could just crush al Qaeda, Islamic terrorism would go away. While the rest of the media spent the last two weeks obsessing over which presidential administration should have known what about al Qaeda when, the Times droned on, repeating what it includes in just about every article on the subject — that our government may be cutting off al Qaeda’s funds, but it hasn’t even so much as asked the Saudis to stop pumping money into these schools.
In comparison to the threat posed by the vast spread of Wahabbism, the radical form of Islam that guided the Sept. 11 terrorists, al Qaeda itself is more like a high-profile blip on the screen. Knocking off al Qaeda’s leaders won’t matter, because there are thousands more waiting to take their place. They’ll just adopt a new name and keep going.
America’s chief handicap in the war on terror is our ignorance and egocentric attitude. We actually think this is about us, an us-versus-al Qaeda thing. It’s not.
The chief aim of the radical Muslim movement right now isn’t to annihilate America. They need oil money to accomplish their long-term goals, and we help provide that. Their goal is to use high-profile hits to accomplish their real aim — recruitment and territorial occupation. They’ve been at this for 200 years, and they are masters at it. First, they infiltrate war and poverty-ravaged nations and proselytize. As the number of followers grows, they turn on mainline Muslims, eventually slaughtering those who refuse to adopt Wahabbi ways. Then, when no one is left to stop them, they rule. A small band of radical Muslims and the first member of the Saudi royal family conquered the entire Arabian Peninsula this way. Though few people know it, they also did this in Afghanistan. Wahabbi warriors came in at the tail end of the Soviet war, when chaos rained, claimed victory and then brutally suppressed the mainline, peaceful Muslims who lived there, including women, who before the war with Russia held 40 percent of the country’s professional positions.
These days, they’re busy indoctrinating the youth of Pakistan. Over the last decade, so many of that country’s children have been indoctrinated in madrasas, which provide food and education to those who would otherwise go without, that when it comes time for their generation to rule the country, radical Islam will rule as well.
But Pakistan is just one example. Today’s militants blow up things. From Indonesia to Bangladesh to Morocco, when the next generation of radicals comes of age, they will rule countries.
There’s only one way to combat this — stop the flow of Saudi oil money into the madrasas. Because radical Islamists have a death grip on the throat of the Saudi royal family and are firmly entrenched in Saudi government posts, there’s only one way to permanently do that — somehow gradually decrease the world’s dependence on Saudi oil, and thus the Saudis’ stranglehold on the world oil market, without devastating the world economy in the process. Since about 18 percent of America’s oil comes from Saudi Arabia (down from 28 percent a decade ago) this would mean convincing the rest of the world to go along as well.
In short, it would take a miracle. But if we don’t find a way to do this, the price will be a world so filled with repression and terror that the last two and a half years will pale by comparison.
These people may fade from the news, or fail to make the news at all, but they aren’t going away. While we argue over whether President Bush or President Clinton could have stopped Sept. 11, they’re just growing stronger.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2004.
