The
ABC's of Hatred
We urge the free world to put a stop to
the culture of hatred
By
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
urely
the most chilling aspect of the latest terrorist attack in Saudi
Arabia against foreigners at the Khobar oil center was in reports
from the scene about how the Saudi militants tried to kill or
capture only the non-Muslims, and let Muslims and Arabs go. The
Associated Press quoted a Lebanese woman, Orora Naoufal, who was
taken hostage in her apartment, as saying that the gunmen released
her when they learned of her nationality. They told her they were
interested in harming only "infidels" and Westerners.
Now where would the terrorists have
learned such intolerance and discrimination? Answer: in the Saudi
public school system and religious curriculum.
That is the only conclusion one can draw,
not only from listening to what the terrorists said, but, more
important, from listening to what some courageous Saudi liberals —
and yes, there are many progressive Saudis who want their country to
become more open and tolerant — are saying in their own press.
The Saudi English-language daily, Arab
News, recently published a series by the liberal Saudi writer Raid
Qusti about the need to re-evaluate Saudi education. Mr. Qusti
quotes the editor of Al Riyadh newspaper as saying the people
carrying out this latest rash of attacks inside Saudi Arabia have
the same ideology as the Saudi extremists who seized the Grand
Mosque in Mecca in 1979. They had an ideology of accusing all others
as being "infidels," thereby giving themselves a license to kill
them.
"If we as a nation decline to look at the
root causes, as we have for the past two decades, it will only be a
matter of time before another group of people with the same ideology
springs up," noted Mr. Qusti. "Have we helped create these monsters?
Our education system, which does not stress tolerance of other
faiths — let alone tolerance of followers of other Islamic schools
of thought — is one thing that needs to be re-evaluated from top to
bottom. Saudi culture itself and the fact the majority of us do not
accept other lifestyles and impose our own on other people is
another. And the fact that from the fourth to the 12th grade, we do
not teach our children that there are other civilizations in the
world and that we are part of the global community, and only stress
the Islamic empires over and over, is also worth re-evaluating. And
last but certainly not least, the religious climate in the country
must change." (Memri translation.)
Over the last year or so, Hamza Qablan
al-Mozainy, an Arabic professor at King Saud University, published
two articles in the Saudi daily Al Watan about "the culture of death
in our schools" and the role that Saudi teachers are playing in
promoting discussions on how bodies are prepared for burial and how
the kind of life a person has led — righteous or decadent — can be
read from the condition of the person's dead body. This effort to
use death to get young people to abstain from the attractions of
life, he said, only ends up making some Saudi youth easy targets for
extremists trying to recruit young people for "jihad" operations.
"Does the Education Ministry really know about the activities taking
place in its schools?" Mr. al-Mozainy asked.
As the saying goes, "Denial is not just a
river in Egypt" — and Saudi leaders have been in denial for too
long. They need to wake up — and we need an energy policy that
reduces our dependence on Saudi oil. I don't want the difference
between a good day and bad day to be whether Saudi Arabia reforms
its education system.
A few years ago, Vice President Dick
Cheney dismissed those of us who advocate energy conservation as
dreamy do-gooders. Had he spent the last three years using his bully
pulpit to push for conservation and alternative energies, rather
than dismissing them, we'd be a lot less dependent today on foreign
oil. Oh, that is so naïve, says the oil crowd. Well, what would you
call a Bush energy policy that keeps America dependent on a medieval
monarchy with a king who has lost most of his faculties, where there
is virtually no transparency about what's happening, where
corruption is rampant, where we have asked all Americans to leave
and where the education system is so narrow that its own people are
decrying it as a factory for extremism? Now that's what I'd call
naïve. I'd also call it reckless and dangerous |