In one of the most serious confessions ever made by terrorists, the media quoted one member of a terror group as saying his organization used to collect about SR1 million every day from charity money donated by people in the Kingdom. He also said the amount collected grew by appealing to wealthy women to give more.
That money buys weapons that kill and maim and destroy both public and private property. Yet we keep asking ourselves: “Where do the terrorists get all the money in their possession?”
Many writers have called for streamlining and rationalizing charity money. Some asked for using these funds to finance research, training and other useful activities. There are many cases of Saudis who excel in their areas of knowledge and are in need of support to pursue their research. An example is Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel. She is the sole inventor of the TriStem Technology that discovered the process of retrodifferentiation and also developed ways of committing the retrodifferentiated cells into a variety of cells/tissue types. Based on her research, she co-founded the TriStem Group. When she couldn’t secure the money needed for her research, she agreed with her husband to spend her savings to complete her research abroad. Her research may transform the treatments for a wide variety of diseases such as leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Her method not only produces a supply of healthy cells from the patient’s own blood, but it generates far more cells, much more quickly, than alternative methods — and without raising ethical dilemmas.
The stark contradiction here is that while terror groups, who declare others kafirs, blow up buildings and kill the innocent in a bid to destroy society, are being showered with money coming from charities, a scientist like Dr. Abuljadayel, whose medical discovery could help treat millions afflicted by diseases that have been considered incurable, is denied the money she needed to pursue her research and finds herself forced to use her life savings to finance her work.
Had we been cautious in an earlier time and devised a mechanism for the better utilization of charity money instead of allowing the money to end up at the hands of killers, we now would be in a far better position.
