A madrassa is an Islamic religious school. Many of the Taliban were educated in Saudi-financed madrassas in Pakistan that teach Wahhabism, a particularly austere and rigid form of Islam which is rooted in Saudi Arabia. Around the world, Saudi wealth and charities contributed to an explosive growth of madrassas during the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. During that war (1979-1989), a new kind of madrassa emerged in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region -- not so much concerned about scholarship as making war on infidels. The enemy then was the Soviet Union, today it's America. Here are analyses of the madrassas from interviews with Vali Nasr, an authority on Islamic fundamentalism, and Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. (For more on the role of madrassas in producing militant Islamists, see the story of Haroun Fazul.)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/madrassas.html
Liberals are like a "Slinky". Totally useless, but somehow ya can't help but smile when you see one tumble down a flight of stairs!
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