Now wait a minute. I thought that jihad terrorism was a product of poverty and ignorance of the true, peaceful teachings of Islam. Don’t these universities in a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim teach any courses about Islam? Isn’t education supposed to be a hedge against “radicalization”?
Or maybe what the learned analysts tell us is a load of buncombe, and here is yet more evidence of that. “Malaysian colleges a hotbed for militant recruiting: experts,” by Romen Bose for AFP, December 27:
KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysia’s universities have become prime recruiting grounds for Islamic militants looking for youngsters to draw into terrorist networks, security experts warn.
Unlike neighbouring Indonesia and Thailand, the moderate Muslim-majority nation has remained largely free of terror attacks but there are fears that lax admission policies have created a haven for jihadists.
Ah. Lax admission policies — there’s your problem. Tighten up those SAT score requirements, and all will be well!
A string of arrests and detentions this year have highlighted the growing presence of radicals using Malaysia as a base to sign up supporters and plan attacks.
“The terror threat to Malaysia is very real in terms of terrorists who come in as students,” Zamihan Mat Zin, deputy head of the Malaysian Islamic Training Centre, told AFP.
“They are under the radar so they can recruit and create terrorists in our midst,” said Zamihan, who is among a group of Muslim scholars engaged by the government to rehabilitate terror suspects in custody.
In June, authorities deported 45-year-old Al-Qaeda-linked Syrian scholar Aiman Al Dakak along with eight other foreigners from Syria, Yemen, Nigeria and Jordan, most of them students.
Al Dakak gave lectures to Malaysian and foreign students at his Kuala Lumpur home, allegedly indoctrinating them with jihadist ideology and urging them to carry out bombings on places of worship in the multi-ethnic nation.
The following month, engineer Mohamad Fadzullah was detained under internal security laws for trying to recruit students at Malaysia’s national university and technical institutes for the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) extremist group….