In PJ Lifestyle I discuss a new example from Syria of how jihadis are made:
The videois chilling: a jihadist from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, al-Qaeda’s branch for those two countries, addresses a crowd of boys at a school in Syria, rallying them to jihad. The boys look to be about ten or twelve years old, and they eagerly participate in the lesson — which is all about how Muslims should wage war and slaughter infidels in order to defend Islam….
All this is bad enough, but the video ends shortly after that, leaving us with no clue as to the answer to the most important question: What happened next? Did these boys rush to join the jihad and slaughter infidels? Did they go home and get asked by their mothers, “What did you learn in school today?” If they did, and answered honestly, did their mothers react with horror and tell them that believing that Islam required them to slaughter infidels was a twisting and hijacking of their Religion of Peace? Did they quickly pull their children out of the school and upbraid the principal for allowing this incitement to hatred and violence to take place on school grounds?
And whatever happened next, what will become of these boys in five or ten years? How many of them will heed the call to slaughter infidels for the sake of Islam? Will any of them be stopped by the moderates that we are constantly told are the vast majority of Muslims, and who despise and abhor the violent jihadists? Will any school — the school where this jihadist spoke or any other — hold a session about how Islam is really peaceful and doesn’t involve slaughtering infidels?
For years the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the source of this video, has been chronicling similar teachings of violence and hate in Islamic schools in Pakistan. And so it is no surprise that the Taliban are today alive and well in Pakistan, and that in that country the tiny Christian and Hindu minorities increasingly face violent persecution. The boys in Pakistani madrassas learned their lessons well, and are applying them. The same thing is likely to happen in Syria and elsewhere — everywhere that the Qur’an’s exhortations to violence against infidels is taken as applying to the present day.
Children, at least some of them, learn what they”re taught, and follow in the paths their elders have mapped out for them. Yet in response to all this, Western leaders issue denial after denial that any of this has anything to do with Islam, or that it calls for any accountability, much less genuine reform, among Muslims in the West. Some of the current shapers of public opinion and public policy may be repeating that Islam is a religion of peace and that only “Islamophobes” think otherwise right at the very moment that one of the boys who learned the Syria jihadist’s lessons in this video begins to slit an infidel’s throat.