Several readers have e-mailed me, asking why I haven’t written about the connection between the Saudi Academy in Northern Virginia and Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the guy recently extradited from Saudi Arabia to stand trial in the US. Some blogs, like The Jawa Report seem to support a direct cause-and-effect analysis.
The reason I haven’t posted is that I didn’t think it was that big a story.
The Saudi Academy was established by the Saudi government to provide the equivalent of a Saudi education for Muslim students–primarily Saudi. The school followed the same curriculum as the state schools within Saudi Arabia.
There’s nothing untoward about that, in itself. The US government helps establish and subsidizes schools in foreign countries that follow an American curriculum for foreign students–primarily American. This can be through schools operated by the Department of Defense (I’m the product of one of those, in Ankara, Turkey), or an “International” or “American” school operated by private entities. This is sometimes done through a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), sometimes through requesting the host government’s permission.
It’s not surprising that people who are living abroad want their kids to get an education that will serve them when they return home. The children of diplomats, the military, scholars, and businesspeople tend to move around a lot. They cannot learn a new language just to go through grade school or high school. They also need a consistent curriculum that they can use in the next school they show up in.
Foreign schools on a country’s soil often present problems for some people. “Why,” they ask, “are students being taught things that do not accord with our local system?” There are Saudis who resent the fact that there are students learning “un-Islamic” things in a classroom sited in Saudi Arabia. They object to Pakistani schools that follow a Pakistani curriculum and Indian schools that follow an Indian curriculum. They really don’t like a secularist American education. They object, too, to having boys and girls in the same classes. They want the schools shut down.
The problem in the Abu Ali case, of course, is that the Saudi national curriculum, until very recently, was a bad one. Even the Saudis eventually recognized that and have changed the curriculum and their texts, and are working on overhauling their entire theory of education. A system that had required nothing much more than repeating what the student had been told is being changed to one that instills critical thinking skills. A curriculum that had been far too narrow is being expanded to permit students to learn about the world at large.
These changes should have been made years ago. The lousy curriculum should never have been instituted in the first place. That, though, is a situation that normally is not our business. In this case, though, we are concerned about the Saudi education system because it seems to have somehow led to acts of terror against Americans.
Some people see a connection between the “education” that Abu Ali got at the Saudi Academy and his inclination to join Al-Qaeda. Maybe. I do think that an education that demonizes the “other” for no reason more than being different, is a dangerous education. An education that encourages students to think of others as less than human because they follow a different religion can certainly be use as a basis for more extreme thinking and behavior.
But before a causal link can be made between that education and terror, something needs to be explained.
Thousands of students have gone through the Saudi Academy, maybe tens of thousands.
If the education they received makes them into terrorists, then why are not those thousands of students also terrorists?
I can find no source that identifies a single other Saudi Academy graduate who has been arrested, indicted, or even reported as being involved in an act of terror.
The attempt to create a causal linkage is weak because it is based on a sample of one. This is the same weakness that appears in many arguments about social conditions leading to different crimes.
How is it that the brothers and sisters of a criminal, raised in exactly the same environment, are not always also criminals?
Sure, there are “criminal families” in which many, if not all, siblings end up criminal–Frank & Jesse James, Ma Barker and her sons. But that’s not the normal case. How did Ted Koczynski end up as the Unabomber and his brother David end up turning him in? They had not only the same basic education, but the same parents, lived in the same house, hung around with the same kids in the same neighborhood.
Why are not all siblings of a drug offender also drug offenders? They share the same environment, the same education, but they don’t all turn criminal or drug abusers.
The facts don’t support the supposition that an education in the Saudi Academy, however poor that might have been, leads to terrorist behavior. Millions of Saudis have gone through Saudi schools with the same curriculum. At most, there seem to be a few thousand who have turned to terror. Why is the country not comprised entirely of terrorists?
The facts do support the view that–for some people–an education that limits one’s ability to deal with the real world can be used as a starting point toward radicalization.
I do believe that the Saudi education system, until very recently, was conducive toward extremist thinking and that extremist thinking can lead to extremist acts. Changes have been made and they may–or may not–be enough to avoid that outcome. But the education that Ahmed Omar Abu Ali received cannot be used to “explain” the roots of terror.
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February:25:2005 - 11:14
Well-written.
February:25:2005 - 11:14
Saudi Arabia Latest
Dan Drezner says that reform there is happening but slow.
John Burgess has a long post about Ahmed
February:25:2005 - 11:14
from Powerline blog
From Counter Terror blog
From Warriors for Truth blog, taken from a Washington Post article
From Front Page on-line magazine
The evidence I could find online about the ISA doesn’t cast it in a good light.
Something I would like to find out is exactly how the educational program has changed in Saudi schools. How are the Qutbist and Jihadist/Muhirab leanings of the old instruction being ameliorated? I’ve read plenty of pretty platitudes about fixing the education system, but have seen no concrete proposals or proofs of change. Is it another chimera, like empty Saudi promises to restrict charitable giving to terrorists? I hope not. But I fear so.
Sincerely, Lorenzo
[UPDATE: I changed the formatting for hyperlinks in this comment because they were messing up the page layout. No other changes were made. JB]
February:25:2005 - 11:14
Lorenzo: Thanks for your comment. The points you raise agree with the points I was making.
A Comptroller from the ISA may also have been involved in terror and one more of several thousand students was flagged for possible involvement with terrorist. So that doubled the student participation: it’s now 2/20,000. What the explanation for why the other 19,998 students aren’t similarly engaged?
That Abu Ali hung around with very questionable people is also clear. They, too, lived in N. Virginia, but don’t seem to have any connection with the Saudi Academy. If there’s evidence that suggests otherwise, I’ll be happy to note it.
That some Americans don’t have any idea that there are schools in the USA that don’t follow American curricula–as there are American schools abroad exercising the same privilege–is also clear from the 2002 Washington Post article from which the Counter Terror and Front Page pieces are taken. The people at Counter Terror and Front Page should know it, though; they’ve lived overseas and some of them are products of just such schools. I suspect they do, but find they can use that general ignorance as a useful tool with which to make their larger points. There are French, German, British, Indian schools in the US which behave in the same way–not following American curricula–but pointing out that fact doesn’t move forward the proposition that it’s Islamic schools at the heart of terrorism.
You ask how one can check whether there really is reform in Saudi schools and that it’s not just PR fluff.
The best way is to write your Congressman/woman to ask that they check. When I was at the US Embassy in Riyadh, in 2002, they did exactly that and my office collected every single textbook used in schools and sent them to Congress for examination. (That examination resulted in the seminal Washington Post article from which the other pieces you cite originate.) An updated examination would put the matter to the test.
That examination was a useful exercise because it also brought to the attention of otherwise unengaged Saudis that they had problems with the textbooks. One result was the Foreign Minister’s acknowledgement at “15% was questionable and 5% was abhorent”.
You can follow the dialogue in Saudi newspapers as Saudi parents complained about extremist materials and demanded their removal. And see that the government responded to demands from its own citizens. Their complaints now focus on the teachers and what they actually are teaching. I try to cover these issues with this blog.
As far as the “empty promises” in restricting charitable giving, your perception does not accord with that of the US Treasury, FBI, or State, all of whom find that significant controls are in place and in operation.
Treasury even notes that some of those controls are the strictest in the world. Google the name “Juan Zarate” and read his Congressional testimony. You can also check this press release from Treasury. Zarate is Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Anti-Terror & Anti-Crime Financing. He believes it, though, as always, there’s “more that could be done”.
February:25:2005 - 11:14
Islamic Terror High School? Yes or No?
I like Crossroads Arabia a lot. Recently John at the site wrote that he didn’t think the story about the Islamic Saudi Academy in Northern Virginia, of which Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who is on trial for conspiring to assassinate the President of the Unite…
February:25:2005 - 11:14
See this article on Joseph Braude’s blog for information about charitable giving in Saudi Arabia. I quote
The article goes on to show how it behoves the Saudi charities to say they have stopped the flow of money to terrorists (who kill Saudis), and to insinuate to Arab donors that they give money to insurgents and freedom fighters (who kill Americans). This is understandable. However, the fact that we do not have a trusted third party auditing the charities makes me wonder. Sarbanes-Oxley is applying much stricter oversight on every single public company in the USA than any of these Saudi charities. We need some trustworthy international organization (assuming there is such a creature) to audit these charities, and keep on auditing them.
Sincerely, Lorenzo
February:25:2005 - 11:14
Another point to make is that terrorism is actually fairly cheap.
February:25:2005 - 11:14
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