That is a very strange article Peter Bergen and Swati Pandi have in the NYTimes today. It argues that the notion that young Muslims are being radicalized by what they learn in Islamic schools (madrassas) is just as fictional as the oft-debunked contention that poverty drives people to terrorism.

Bergen and Pandi conveniently avoid confronting what is actually taught in the madrassas – many of which are financed by hundreds of millions of dollars the source of whose stream throughout the world, for years, has been Saudi Wahhabists committed to proselytizing the most extreme form of militant Islam. They also steer clear of the fact that some terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, make a point of operating Madrassas that inculcate in the young that their hateful world view. Instead, the authors offer a coincidence-does-not-mean-causation theory that goes like this: while some terrorists have attended madrassas, many terrorists have also attended regular universities (in the U.S. and elsewhere); ergo, it is no more appropriate to claim madrassas lead to terrorism than to say the average college education does.

The “myth” here is the authors’ false premise. No one is claiming that the nuts and bolts of how-to terrorism is the main problem with the madrassas (although there is surely some of that). The main problem is that the radical madrassas drive into children, at a very young and impressionable age, the attitudes that will inevitably inspire some percentage of them into active terrorism – and even if that percentage is small, that is still a very large potential pool of terrorists. The authors unwittingly concede this when they write:

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.

The principal point of the radical madrassas is not to teach technical or linguistic terrorist skills. Terror organizations have other forums (like training camps) to handle that. The point is precisely to breed a mode of thinking that is hospitable to crossing the line from sympathizing with radical points of view to active participation in terrorism.

The authors also ignore another inescapable reality. To succeed, terrorism requires not only operatives who are willing to do the dirty work but support networks that are essential to facilitating, concealing and protecting those operatives. The madrassas unquestionably contribute to a culture that fosters such support networks.