People unclear on the concept

I have just read what is possibly the best example I've ever seen of completely missing the point. The Madrassa Myth is so dense that I'm not entirely certain it isn't a work of satire. (H/T to K-Lo in the Corner)

All I know of the authors is what the article says at the bottom:

Peter Bergen, the author of "Holy War Inc.," is a fellow at the New America Foundation. Swati Pandey is a research associate there.

So, what is the New America Foundation? According to their website:

The purpose of the New America Foundation is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation's public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum. Through its Fellowships and Policy Programs, New America sponsors a wide range of research, writing, conferences, and events on the most important issues of our time.

The New America Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy institute that was conceived through the collaborative work of a diverse and intergenerational group of public intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives. New America's founding President and CEO is Ted Halstead, and its Board of Directors is chaired by James Fallows. Based in our nation's capital, the Foundation opened its doors in January 1999.

If this article is representative of the output, I'd say someone's not getting their money's worth...

So, what is "The Madrassa Myth?"

It is one of the widespread assumptions of the war on terrorism that the Muslim religious schools known as madrassas, catering to families that are often poor, are graduating students who become terrorists. Last year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell denounced madrassas in Pakistan and several other countries as breeding grounds for "fundamentalists and terrorists." A year earlier, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld had queried in a leaked memorandum, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

Right. Fundamentalist Islamists are training children to hate Americans, and that in turn generates terrorists. According to the authors of this piece, that's a "myth." Why is that? Why, because most of them don't become terrorists! And they don't actually learn terrorist skills (at the madrassas)!

While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed, there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West. And as a matter of national security, the United States doesn't need to worry about Muslim fundamentalists with whom we may disagree, but about terrorists who want to attack us.

I've read that paragraph over and over again, trying to comprehend the thought processes that would lead one to write it and take it seriously, and it completely escapes me. The madrassas "do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist," so we shouldn't worry about them? They're not a problem? You see, we shouldn't be worried about "Muslim fundamentalists with whom we may disagree," but only about "terrorists who want to attack us."

Excuse me, Mr. Bergen, but don't you think that there might possibly be some overlap among those groups? Don't you think that, just possibly, maybe, some of those "terrorists who want to attack us," want to attack us specifically because they're "Muslim fundamentalists with whom we may disagree?"

"There is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West." Is there any evidence that they produce people desirous of attacking the west? Because, if the desire is there, one would think that the skills might be acquirable elsewhere.

We examined the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of the most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a majority of them are college-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering. In the four attacks for which the most complete information about the perpetrators' educational levels is available - the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53 percent of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52 percent of Americans have been to college. The terrorists in our study thus appear, on average, to be as well educated as many Americans.

You see, that is what is known as a non-sequitur. It's a statement that is not responsive to the issue at hand.

"Do madrassas breed, inspire, or otherwise contribute to the increase of, people who would like to commit terrorist acts against the West in general or the United States in particular?"
"Why, no - the percentage of terrorists with college education is comparable to the number of Americans with college educations!"

Objection, your honor. Not responsive to the question that was asked.
There are a great many American's who have technical knowledge and can fly planes, but aren't terrorists. So maybe, just maybe, the technical knowledge to commit terrorism is less important than having the motivation to become a terrorist!

The 1993 World Trade Center attack involved 12 men, all of whom had a college education. The 9/11 pilots, as well as the secondary planners identified by the 9/11 commission, all attended Western universities, a prestigious and elite endeavor for anyone from the Middle East. Indeed, the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohamed Atta, had a degree from a German university in, of all things, urban preservation, while the operational planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied engineering in North Carolina. We also found that two-thirds of the 25 hijackers and planners involved in 9/11 had attended college.

"Do madrassas breed, inspire, or otherwise contribute to the increase of, people who would like to commit terrorist acts against the West in general or the United States in particular?"
"Why, no - the percentage of terrorists with college education is comparable to the number of Americans with college educations!"
Still not responsive. The fact that they learned engineering and urban preservation pales in comparison to the fact that they learned to hate Americans. They've still not addressed that. The higher level education of the terrorists is irrelevant to the question that they purport to be addressing.

Of the 75 terrorists we investigated, only nine had attended madrassas, and all of those played a role in one attack - the Bali bombing. Even in this instance, however, five college-educated "masterminds" - including two university lecturers - helped to shape the Bali plot.

There we go. Finally, a piece of data that is actually relevant to the discussion at hand. They investigated 75 terrorists, and over 10% of them attended these schools of anti-American proseletyzing. And that, in their opinion, not indicative of even a potential problem. Madrassa attendance among terrorists seems to be less relevant to them than Khalid Sheik Mohammed's engineering studies in North Carolina, as they mentioned the latter before the former.

Like the view that poverty drives terrorism - a notion that countless studies have debunked - the idea that madrassas are incubating the next generation of terrorists offers the soothing illusion that desperate, ignorant automatons are attacking us rather than college graduates, as is often the case. In fact, two of the terrorists in our study had doctorates from Western universities, and two others were working toward their Ph.D.

I know many people with doctorates, and don't believe that one of them would consider flying a plane full of innocent people into an office building which was also full of innocent people. So maybe, possibly, the higher level technical education that these people received is not relevant to the impact of the madrassas.

A World Bank-financed study that was published in April raises further doubts about the influence of madrassas in Pakistan, the country where the schools were thought to be the most influential and the most virulently anti-American. Contrary to the numbers cited in the report of the 9/11 commission, and to a blizzard of newspaper reports that 10 percent of Pakistani students study in madrassas, the study's authors found that fewer than 1 percent do so. If correct, this estimate would suggest that there are far more American children being home-schooled than Pakistani boys attending madrassas.

First, that home-school comment is infuriating. There is no reason to throw it in there other than to exploit some perceived prejudice that home-schooling is mysterious and sinister. Inexcusable, as it serves no logical purpose whatsoever in the case that they're trying to make.

But let's follow the information there to its logical conclusion.

Fewer than 1% of Pakistani boys attend madrassas. That could mean several things:

1. The statistic is not actually correct, and there are far more Pakistanis studying at madrassas than the authors think, in which case the statistic is utterly meaningless.


2. Pakistan is not representative of other Middle Eastern, or Muslim-majority, countries, such as Saudi Arabia (which produced most of the 9/11 hijackers), in which case the statistic is utterly meaningless.


3. Pakistan is representative, in which case madrassa students are significantly over-weighted in their terrorist sample compared to the population in general.

In either the first or second case, the information is useless in proving the point they're trying to make. In the third case, it actually contradicts it. They've told us that only 12% of terrorists attended madrassas. To then turn around and say less than 1% of the general population attends madrassas, that indicates that madrassa students are 12 times more likely to become terrorists than non-madrassa students.

I don't know about you, but that sounds significant to me...

While madrassas are an important issue in education and development in the Muslim world, they are not and should not be considered a threat to the United States.

Right. Teaching young children to hate America "should not be considered a threat to the United States." Teaching them engineering and flight skills, however, is a real problem.

The tens of millions of dollars spent every year by the United States through the State Department, the Middle East Partnership Initiative, and the Agency for International Development to improve education and literacy in the Middle East and South Asia should be applauded as the development aid it is and not as the counterterrorism effort it cannot be.

Shouldn't it be, you know, at least theoretically possible to use US tax dollars to "improve education and literacy" without actually teaching anti-Americanism? Shouldn't it be possible to learn how to read without learning to hate America at the same time?

One more item that they've completely ignored is whether the curriculum's at these madrassas have changed in the last 10 years. What we've seen in the last 5 years is the product of people who's world-views were formed from 1975-1985. The fruits of what is being taught today won't be known for another 15-20 years. This would seem to be relevant to the discussion, and they've not even addressed it.

Altogether, it's an awful piece, with the (meager) evidence that they present more damning to their thesis than supportive of it. Quite fitting for the New York Times, no doubt meeting all of their "journalistic standards", but I wouldn't give it a passing grade in a freshman composition class.



Update:
Cori Dauber has some good questions:

How is that possible if any substantial percentage of their kids are going to schools where they learn nothing but the Koran -- and hating us? What kind of future do those kids have, and what kind of future does our relationship with those countries have, and how much political maneuvering room do governments have when some proportion of their population has been educated that way?