Goal Number 104

The semi-annual "National Dialogue" was held by the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue to discuss major issues in Saudi Arabian education. "Education: Reality and Ways of Development" was held November 28 through 30, 2006 and the results reported by the invaluable MEMRI.

The conference was going smoothly until a few attendees pointed out that the Saudi school system propagated extremism. The Wahhabi clerics present quickly dismissed the very idea that extremism was afoot in Saudi schools. Dr. Muhammad bin Saleh Al-Fawzan of the Riyadh Teachers' College, said that "accusing the curricula of [encouraging] extremism is an echo of what has been said in the West... Curricular change in the religious topics will ultimately lead to a demand for textual change in the Koran." And who would want THAT?! Obviously, any criticism of Saudi Arabia made in the West is automatically wrong.

And so the conference ended, no action was taken, nothing to see here folks, move along. See ya in six months for more of the same old, same old.

Meanwhile, the Saudi press, to its credit, criticized a Saudi Education Ministry document titled "Educational Policy" which laid out the goals for the Saudi school system. Held up for particular criticism was Goal Number 104, which was "to prepare students physically and mentally for jihad for the sake of Allah." Goal Number 60 was "to arouse the spirit of Islamic jihad in order to fight our enemies, to restore our rights and our glory, and to fulfill the mission of Islam." The mission of Islam, in the last words of Mohammed, is to fight every man until the whole world submits to Islam.

Columnist Abd Al-Rahman Al-Habib wrote in Al-Watan of the Saudi school curriculum: "Other theoretical material, such as literature, history, psychology, sociology, and management, are usually [presented in the Saudi education system in a way that is] characteristically narrow-minded, obtuse, and denigrates other cultures and the history of other nations, and also disregards the political aspect. This leaves [us with] students who know nothing about ideological, political, literary, and artistic pluralism in the world, and ultimately creates students who are culturally ignorant and completely devoid of ideological and political awareness." In other words, the kind of ignorant, bigoted radicals who think September 11 was a good idea because they have never been taught anything better.

It's no anomaly that fifteen of the nineteen suicide skyjackers of September 11 came from Saudi Arabia. They were a typical radical product of murderous Wahhabi indoctrination that has been institutionalized in the Saudi school system. Goal Number 104 leads directly to September 11. This indoctrination in jihad against America and the West proceeds unhindered in Saudi Arabia to this very day, spawns jihadis who flock to Iraq to detonate themselves, and will inevitably lead to future attacks on America.

Saudi Arabia claims to be our ally in the war against terror.