If you don’t learn from history, you are in danger of repeating it. That is what Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, governor of Asir, told us last week.

In perhaps one of the most candid interviews with a Saudi official ever televised live, Al-Arabiya last week pressed him to further elucidate “why the smile has vanished from Asir” as he had written in Al-Watan daily.

The prince described how extremism found its way to Saudi Arabia and how once this country was a peaceful place with no violence, killings or explosions.

One of the reasons he gave for the infiltration of extremism into this country was that extremists found “fertile ground” here to spread their venom. They also took advantage of Saudi people’s generosity and goodness. The prince gave an example of how in the past a Saudi would not doubt you if you asked him for money as a contribution to build a mosque abroad. That habit of unquestioning trust sometimes allowed money to end up in the wrong hands and went to purchase weapons, he explained.

Prince Khaled also said that extremists were in the midst of us. He mentioned how they were in places like the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, the Ministry of Education, and even the Ministry of Information.

His mention of the Ministry of Education made me recall my visit to Japan in 2001 as a member of the first Saudi media group to visit Japan in a trip sponsored by the Japanese government.

After we met the deputy mayor of Osaka and left the municipality building, we saw some bands marching in the street and celebrations taking place. When we asked our Japanese hosts if we could watch, the reply came: “I’m sorry. We scrapped your participation in the festival from the schedule because we were told last year that watching or participating in such events were sinful in your religion.”

A group of radicals from the Ministry of Education had visited Japan the previous year. They hid behind ministry badges, while feeding nonsense about our culture as Saudis and our tolerant religion to the Japanese over the past years. The Japanese, being good hosts, wanted to please their guests, so they removed from the program all participation in local events or celebrations from their schedules thinking that Saudi culture required us to shun them.

Prince Khaled told the presenter that he did not believe that our curricula were directly responsible for the spread of extremism in the country. “That only contributes to 20 percent of the problem,” he said. He believed the real problem was teachers not teaching the curriculum in the classroom but preaching to students about other things — including extremist ideas.

His words again made me recall how one of my teachers in secondary school in Makkah used to talk about the “jihad in Afghanistan and Bosnia” and how it was an Islamic duty to fight there, feeding us all sorts of garbage. In most classes, he would do nothing but ramble on.

Many people of the same brand still teach at universities such as Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud, from where ten of our most wanted terrorists graduated.

Prince Khaled also said there was another group of people he called “anesthetics.” These people would do nothing but inject you with anesthetics once you told them that there is a state of danger in the country, or that certain things are getting out of hand. The answers these people give are, “Relax, everything is under control. We are fine.”

He called for the establishment of a supreme commission in Saudi Arabia to be named “The Commission for Combating Terrorism.” The commission would elect most qualified and trustworthy people from other ministries. Their job would be to study extremism in the Kingdom and how it is being spread and infiltrated through public and private sectors.

The prince also mentioned a very important point that I have made in the past. He said that if we do not study the causes of these terrorist acts in our midst now and ignore them as we did when the Juhaiman group appeared, we will commit the same mistake we did 30 years ago.

“We made a mistake in the past and if we do not study the causes of these events carefully now we will make the same mistake again,” said the prince.

Thank you Prince Khaled. We needed to hear those words from you.

Fixing the problem of extremism in our country starts with first publicly acknowledging its existence with all candidness.

And you did just that.