Our Neighbor, Winston Churchill

Our friendly General/President next door gave a speech in which he claimed that an “iron curtain”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/06/1089000160510.html?oneclick=true is falling between the West and Muslims. He also made the assertion that the root of terrorism is illiteracy and poverty and not the madrassa education where a one sided view of the world is taught. “Robert Spencer”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1240 of “Jihad Watch”:http://jihadwatch.org/ has a “rebuttal”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14124.
bq. Musharraf is probably not familiar with numerous studies that indicate that the conventional wisdom he is purveying here is actually false. The idea that terrorists are desperately poor, uneducated, and easily enticed by the promise of a few dollars or a bit of manipulative religious twaddle that the cynical power elite purvey but don?t believe in themselves ? it flies in the face of the facts. Most recently, Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer, has found through extensive background studies of known Al-Qaeda operatives that most Islamic terrorists are, according to a Knight-Ridder report, ?well-educated, married men from middle- or upper-class families, in their mid-20s and psychologically stable ? Many of them knew several languages and traveled widely.? Sageman strongly ruled out the idea that terrorists were misfits and sociopaths: ?The data suggest that these were good kids who liked to go to school and were often overprotected by their parents.?
bq. Last March, the acting President of the radical Muslim party Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), Qazi Hussain Ahmad, threatened to launch nationwide protests if the curriculum in Pakistan?s Islamic schools (madrassas) were reformed to eliminate verses from the Qur?an that taught violent jihad. ?To combat this,? Qazi warned, ?a major jihadi campaign has become necessary.? He sent Musharraf a pointed reminder: ?the general should note that the country came into existence on Islamic ideology and it could survive on that basis alone.? That ideology is taught daily in many of Pakistan?s 27,000 madrassas. A significant percentage of these, according to Newsweek, ?steep their students in the doctrine of holy war and function openly as jihad enlistment centers.? [“Front Page Magazine”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14124]