A yeshiva is a kind of Jewish school. From Merriam-Webster online.
Afghanistan, 1997.
http://www.aidafghanistan.com/page676336.htm
IAN Jewish, but yeah, it looks to me like you could profitably compare a yeshiva and a madrassa.
Thanks for the legwork; yep, I was just asking because I’m Jewish (although Reform who went to public school) and therefore somewhat more familiar with the yeshiva concept.
Well, well Brutus aka Ottto continues his nearly unbroken record of unfounded arguments from ignorance.
A few comments then, briefly as work calls:
All the collected wisdom, if I may seriously abuse the word, of Brutus:
And your comment is nothing more than bleeding ignorance apparently derived from the recent media coverage on Pakistani madressas.
Once more facts:
a) The term madrassa / medresa etc. itself means nothing more than school.
b) In the ex-Arab Islamic world it’s generally used for any religious school and covers everything from something like a Sunday school attached to a mosque to a full-fledged religious school.
c) Insofar as the universe of medresas is quite heterogeneous and that in most Muslim communities Sufist Islam is rather more popular than Wahhabite like or Wahhabi proper Islam (ex-Saudi Arabia) declaring that ‘madrassas seem to be nothing more then [sic] radical islamic [sic] indoctrination centers’ is an idiotic argument on its face. The poster in question, one rather must suspect information is about as deep as, well, a puddle.
d) While the problem of radical teaching in (usually ) unlicensed or licensed religious schools is real, calling them terror training centers is a vast exaggeration. (By the way Brutus, yes this is an opinion but let me give you a hint for free. Some opinions are worth more than others. Now in this context, we can speculate as to whose opinions may be worth more in re this subject. I would suggest undertaking a search on Afghanistan and myself, including my analyses and predications made on this board. Then reflect a bit on your knowledge. It should take a few seconds. The second part.)
e) The real attraction of the schools has not been their theology – the religious schools as one should keep in mind run a large gamut of theological flavors – but the fact that for the poor or even the modest middle class they provide an attractive alternative to the state schooling systems which have been choking on the tidal wave of children in the region (high birth rates, demographic bulge), stultifying state bureaucracies rather more concerned with security than education and state budgets incapable of meeting new demand.
f) Want to address the problem, support massive aid for reasonably secular (as secular as the society will support, pushing too far simply provokes reaction) public and private schools, which should have both economic and social payoffs in the long term. Otherwise, don’t be bloody hypocrite.
g) As such I disagree strongly with Tamerlane, pressure from overseas will do nothing if the underlying problems are not addressed, other than perhaps drive schools underground where they will be more susceptible to extremist control and breed resentment of Westerners who impose droolingly idiotic policies.
Further I may add that the following is an opinion. A well-founded opinion I would say given that typically speculation based on ignorance is, well, ** ignorant**.
But further:
Backpedaling. Scurrying backpedaling.
Ah, Brutus comes up with good old Hafez al-Asad’s flattening of a city. Rather atypical act actually. Most ‘secular’ governments, as in Egypt, rely on secret police and extensive networks of informants.
By the way, the secular terror groups have almost entirely died out. Artefacts of the 1970s and front and middle ends of the 1980s, they lost their bite. Excepting perhaps the PLO in rather more restricted context. The game has been for quite a while Islamic groups.
It is always to encouraging to have arguments from someone who doesn’t know the basics.
In re the Yeshiva connexion, some things labeled as Medresa are equivalent to Yeshiva as I understand Yeshiva is normally used, but a medresa can also be something not much more than a Sunday school. Usage varies widely.
Collounsbury, while I concede I was rash in using the term madrassa so liberally, that’s not really the subject of the debate I was intending to start. It would be foolish to deny that there are a large number of fundamentalist Islamic schools out there engaged in the type of practices I described in my OP. Yeshivas and sunday schools are not relevant - there are not very many little Jews and Christians being taught to be Baruch Goldsteins and Eric Rudolphs.
So the real question then is what action the US can take in the context of its larger war against Islamist terrorism. These ideas are the root causes of terrorism. Preventing them from spreading is perhaps the most important thing the US can do given the current situation. It think Tamerlane is on the right track with his thoughts about better press and intelligent propaganda. This war is not only fought with weapons; it is fought with ideas as well. The real question is how to get our beliefs out there, and specifically into the school system. Voice of America may work for adults (though perhaps not so much lately in its quest for “evenhandedness”). However, tomorrow’s potential terrorists get their ideas from school, not from the radio. What I am asking is really a tactical question: how to defeat the infiltration of corrupt and dangerous ideas into a population that will apply them to our detriment in the future?
The idea of sending massive amounts of aid to the Middle East to stop this sort of thing is, to put it lightly, a little half-baked. It is tantamount to paying a murderer not to kill you. The thought that money American taxpayers send to these countires will not be misused and spent on the exact type of schools we are trying to discredit is incredibly naive. After all, governments 'round those parts aren’t exactly known for their accountability or transparency.
Bloody arguments from ignorance.
As brief as I can make this then,
Yeshivas and goddamned Sunday Schools are relevant for people to understand what the hell a medresa is, what its functions are and for them not to post things like you and our ever so well-informed Brutus did, unfactually and incorrectly implying that medresa is simply a fundie school teaching folks to become terrorists.
The ** reality ** if we can leave aside the propaganda, is rather more complex.
It would be foolish to generalize in ignorance – as I am of that quaint school that rather believes that being well-informed about the actual subject is a prime requisite for speculating on it in a manner that may produce more than empty posturing and idiotic inanities like ‘Axis of Evil.’
There are numbers of radical schools. I don’t know anyone knows any actual numbers or indeed actual numbers on ‘wild-cat’ schools – or unlicensed mosques or whatever. Certainly of course one can get a better sense from Saudi school system, but that is a rather unique case. A state sponsored Wahhabi controlled monstrosity. Saudi Arabia has deep problems, but nobody’s got leverage over them, so you can whank and whank about how to ‘fix’ their society, but change is going to have to come from within there.
Which ‘ideas’? Hyper-conservative Islam? Islam? Kill the Kufaar?
Not all one and the same.
Nor is the medresa the sole, even perhaps the main route. Mosques. Radio. Bootleg tapes by banned preachers.
Of course, ideas only spread when they find fertile soil. Root causes.
Ah, you think…. It isn’t terribly evident, but let’s actually reflect for a moment.
Stopping the spread of ‘those’ ideas. Fighting with what?
There are not magic wands for ideas you know, or so I might hope with great optimism.
How does one get ‘better press’? Intelligent propaganda, do you have any clue as to what that might be? Let me suggest to you, a radical thought. Intelligent propaganda has to be (a) believable by the target population (not self-serving, slap-yourself-on-the-back appeals to the know-nothing red-meat crowd at home, e.g. ‘Axis of Evil’ and hypocritical calls for democracy but only if the results suit our policy need of the minute.) (b) should have some underlying basis and support, that is claiming X while doing Y is clear hypocrisy and will be seen as such © has to speak to the target population in their own idiom, not just language but idiom.
Oh this is bloody brilliant. Just bloody brilliant. Get our beliefs out there and into the school system.
(a) Which goddamned school system? The wild-cat private Quranic schools or the public state schools? Two different items. Ignoring for the moment licensed private schools.
(a) What society invites foreign agitprop into their schools? Do you have the slightest sense of other socieities? Or let us just take America, land of the congenitally fearful of all things foreign, and think about Commie scares and the like in re schools. Take a hint, folks don’t like their children to be propagandized (except in re their preexisting beliefs) and a ham-handed effort to put American propaganda in schools will fail. Never mind the problem you’re supposedly concerned about is well outside the purview of where one can even conceive of sending such materials.
(a) The evenhandedness of VoA is the goddamned key to its success. Perhaps it does not occur to the know-nothing ignorant of all things un-American and never the slightest bit capable of wrapping their minds around other societies crowd that typically gets all upset about even-handedness, but obvious goddamned partisan propaganda is readily recognizable as such and fails. The region is full of various sides propaganda. The most effective way of spreading American values, the real ones and not the red-meat ignoramus ones, is to demonstrate such values in action, to demonstrate a commitment to the same and give folks a taste of it. Impartial reporting (like BBC) is highly valued in the region. If VoA wants an audience outside of some idiot-boy know-nothing partisan, even-handed impartiality is *precisely the route to take.
Assertion. Assertion based on painful ignorance.
The routes for Islamist propaganda are multiple and as I have observed first hand, largely seem to be mosque based, guys selling bootleg tapes and CDs of fire-breathers, holding ‘study-sessions’ and giving free functional literacy classes for the poor and the excluded.
In every case I know of, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey etc. the Islamists have gained ground by addressing popular anger on a number of fronts through effective agitation and social action:
(a) self-help societies (Islamic community lending if you will)
(a) aid societies for the poor
(a) literacy and free or subsidized schools for the poor, adult or children
(d) attacks on the real problems of government corrruption and economic stagnation.
Schools? Schools are a symptom.
Address the goddamned underlying problems.
Oh it’s half baked eh? You base this of course on your extensive familiarity with the region, your command of its economic situation and politics, your experience? Oh, that’s me, sorry I was confused, no you base this on a half-baked read of some articles on Saudi and Paki schools. Yehaw.
The analogy is also a failure, insofar as the children are hardly analogous to murders, perhaps to the children of murders and the children of people who are not murderers but somehow vaguely associated with murderers in your mind.
What is half-baked is your magical thinking in regards to propaganda and how Islamist influence spreads.
Naïve, you’re calling me naïve?! You are unable even to distinguish between the differing sets of school systems and display no knowledge at all of the region and you call me naïve?
Oh gee, thanks for the fucking news, I mean it’s only my goddamned job and career dealing with them, why it comes as a complete shock that these payments I have been making are non-transparent. Dear me, I gots me panties all in knot now, I work in and on a non-accountable and non-transparent region lo all these years and I never noticed. Wallahi, I should run and change careers.
Collounsbury
No offense intended but maybe you should simply write down as much as you know about the middle east and related issues, make a website out of it and then just post an appropriate link every time you find some ignorance to be eradicated. I make a point of reading your posts and frankly I’m beginning to worry about your blood pressure 
Fang, Collounsbury, just a few thoughts on the subject of the likelihood of trying to impose U.S. cultural values on the Middle East: this is not from a person who has ever set foot in the Middle East (the closest I’ve ever gotten is Odessa, Ukraine), but I believe some of the concepts are transferrable. Please feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong: who the hell am I kidding? Of course you will!
I have spent a fair amount of time in various chunks of the former Soviet Union, speak Russian and Spanish fluently, have a bachelor’s in Spanish and an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies, and a passing acquaintaince with the intertwining issues of ethnicity, religious and national identity, and the mostly Muslim portions of the FSU, as most of my grad research and my thesis focused on related issues. I’ve been privileged to know personally a fair number of Muslims from the FSU, mostly North Caucasians (they seem to come out of the woodwork sometimes at the most unlikely moments, like on Finnair flights from Helsinki to NY), and may I say that nothing else I’ve experienced quite matches Caucasian hospitality. The biggest surprise for me, though, at the time a nice Jewish girl form Illinois, was to meet my first bunch of Muslims and to discover that they didn’t hate Jews at all, and in fact to hear many speeches about how they loved and respected Jews and Jewish culture and the Jewish attitude toward education and family values. I was ashamed to realize I couldn’t tell them a single thing in return about Islamic values, because I didn’t know anything.
Even though I live in the U.S., I’ve spent my entire career working with refugees and immigrants from all over the world, and probably more than half of my close friends are either not U.S. natives or are first-generation immigrants caught between two cultures, and so I’m at home in a wide variety of cultures. On numerous occasions, I’ve been the only native-born American in a room full of foreigners bitching about how clueless, closed-minded, and intolerant Americans are, and how they’re always gloating about how their way of life is so superior and how they’re always trying to impose it on others as if it were the only “right” way to live.
Unfortunately, these criticisms are all too frequently well-founded. There is no single “right” way to live, and God (or Allah, or Yahweh, or whatever you want to call the higher power that you may or may not believe in) knows this country certainly doesn’t have everything down pat! And many Americans have a bad habit of underestimating the intelligence and political sophistication of those who live in what we would like to consider to be backward, Third World countries. Just because a guy can’t read doesn’t mean he is clueless or lacks a well-formed opinion about what is going on around him!
If George W. preaches to the Palestinians about how they should ditch Yasser, do you honestly think they can’t figure out what his political and ideological biases are and take his speech with the requisite number of grains of salt? Maybe if we would all stop gloating about how superior we are long enough to see the Middle East, or the Russian, or the Chinese situation from the other guy’s moccasins, we would manage to learn something about the other guy’s history and culture, and we might actually PREVENT conflicts. Maybe if we had people working with the military who knew something about Afghanistan, our pilots wouldn’t do boneheaded things like bomb wedding receptions because someone fires a gun in the air!
It is torturous for me to watch what’s going on in Afghanistan, or Georgia, because I fear the U.S. military is getting involved in conflicts whose scope it can’t begin to comprehend, and that we won’t learn anything from other countries’ experiences there because we have no collective consciousness of what actually happened there.
OK, it’s late, and this is not the world’s most cohesive rant. Any other thoughts on any issues you might be able to untangle from this mess? I’ll re-read tomorrow and see if there’s anything to add or clarify.