The following text was part of the conclusion to the original Fire/Men essay. It is not included in the article published in JUDAISM.

Teach your children or sacrifice them?

America is not perfect. We owe it to ourselves to refine our ideals and the actions that flow from them. Americans owned slaves less than 150 years ago; American women could not vote less than 100 years ago. But we offer a vision that no one has matched, of a separation of church and state. This is a recent development in world history. During most of the last 2000 years, nations have been run by, or greatly influenced by, religious authorities. A free people needs to speak a language in which positions are supported by argument and data, with terms that are universally acknowledged.

The world is in the throes of a religious revival. Though it has infected the Muslim world, it is alien to Islam. It is an eruption of an idolatrous cult that voraciously seeks converts. Yet, it is ultimately about political power, because it is a struggle for who defines and interprets the law. It feeds off the indigenous faith and perverts it for its own worship, sacrificing its young sons to hatred and war.

What do we teach our children? If we could read the textbooks and hear the lectures in thousands of classrooms and schools in the Muslim world, would we wonder why young people are so gung-ho for literal jihad against the United States and Israel? “If you review the curriculum [in public schools] in Saudi Arabia, you would see that it promotes any kind of extremist views of Islam, even in the eyes of very devout Muslims,” said Abdul Khadir Tash, the editor of Al Bilad newspaper.1 What happens in Saudi Arabia is significant for two reasons: One, “money from Saudi businessmen accounts for much of the resources of alQaeda,” (according to Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA counterterrorism chief )2 and two, the extremist schools in other parts of the Muslim world are “often supported by donors from other Islamic states like Saudi Arabia.”3

Among these are the madrassas, the Islamic boarding schools in Pakistan. As one of their prayer leaders says “We prepare them for the jihad, mentally…Their minds are fresh.”4 The students are eight to twenty years old. Another teacher, Al-Sheikh Rahat Gul relates the view he propounds to young students: “The Americans kill only innocents. ‘The Koran forbids the killing of females, children, elders and cattle,’ he said. ‘That is war. That is not holy war.’ Sons of Islam must answer that tyranny with holy war, he said. He condemns the World Trade Center attack but dismisses any connection to this part of the world. ‘The Jews have done this,’ he said, calling the attacks a plot by Israel to draw the world into war. ‘And the Hindus are just like them.’”5 “‘Don’t put the blame on the curriculum but on the misinterpretation of the Koran and the Sunnah’ or the saying and actions of prophet Muhammad, said Hamid al-Majid, a professor of education at Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud University, the country’s leading seminary. ‘I believe the way to minimize extremism is to put greater emphasis on religious education, but in a good way.’6 We can only hope this professor will raise his voice. What would such a curriculum look like? The minds are fresh. The boys are poor. Perhaps their parents wouldn’t send them if they could feed them. Perhaps their parents are happy to have holy warriors for sons. How does an economy grow? “To divert the poor from the siren call of terrorists, America and its allies must appeal to their entrepreneurial interests…and focus on development at a micro level, encouraging capitalism from below.”7 Millions of micro-loans, trade, infrastructure, land reform, peace? Yet the hijackers were mostly products of middle class homes, universities, some European universities. “The al-Qaeda network is not made up of dirt-poor Palestinians [or Pakistanis – js], but of ineptly but excessively educated Saudis and Egyptians, fomented by Saudi religious charities.”8 Remember, Hitler’s Germany was the height of European culture. Remember that America has its own, some highly-educated, homegrown worshippers of gods who love human sacrifice – McVeigh, Kaczynski, the Columbine massacrers. How do we cultivate the hearts of our young people? It is much easier to be an instrument of a god than to think for oneself.

When Christians teach their children that God was exerting His will on America through the events of September 11, they are worshipping the same god that they worship on the Afghani border, where they call the sacrifices at the World Trade Center “The wrath of God.” When Jews teach their children that the Holocaust was caused by Jewish assimilation, they are sacrificing to that other god too. “You shall love your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and all your might. And these words which I command you this day, shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children…” 9 But which god? Which is to ask, What interpretation shall we place on “these words”? The one that rings true to the good heart.