The Shoura Council’s decision last month to reject a draft law on national unity that would protect all Saudis from discrimination and racism came to many as a surprise. Of course, the council forwarded strong argument in favor of its decision but we feel that approval of that law would have been much better and would have far-reaching consequences.
One only has to read the newspapers to know that three Saudi brothers the other day were linked to a bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Kuwait last month. One brother then wounded two Saudi police officers when they attempted to arrest him near the Kuwait border. Another brother was arrested in Taif and the third taken into custody in Kuwait and then extradited to Saudi Arabia. A fourth brother is a member of Daesh.
Some Saudis have taken upon themselves to wage war against their fellow countrymen while some Saudi imams continue to denigrate Shiite Saudis. It’s pretty clear that we have a long way to go before achieving national unity.
These are not isolated incidents, but a pattern that is tearing apart the fabric of our society. We take pride in our nation in which 60 percent of the population is under the age of 30. We have taken serious and successful steps in combating terrorism, but we should study the causes.
To truly combat terrorism we must start from primary schools by attending classes with youngsters and determining what ideology they are being exposed to by teachers, administrators and their peers. To succeed in fighting terrorism, creative steps would ensure that future generations would not become weapons to destroy our society and neighboring countries.
The four extremist Saudi brothers bent on murder provide clear evidence that children in every Saudi house are vulnerable to extremist thought. Just because an 8-year-old boy sits in front of PlayStation after school doesn’t mean that he isn’t exposed to radicalism at his school or while playing ball in his neighborhood. Assuming that your neighbor and your neighbor’s kids are just as pious and upright as you and leaving your kids in their care for long hours is a sure way to find them in Iraq or Syria sometime in the future.
We easily hand over our kids to adults to teach and care for them. Why do we trust them so blindly? Because they are Saudi? They look like us? Speak the same language with the same dialect? Today, in 2015, such carelessness is negligence and stupidity.
Individuals who threaten our way of life by inducing our young Saudi men and women into extremist groups are in schools, mosques, summer camps and Internet cafes. If our national dialogue sessions are to be meaningful we should consider how to keep young people out of the hands of Daesh and Al-Qaeda.
Teaching tolerance seems to be no longer fashionable. Perhaps tolerance is a sign of weakness to young Saudi men who prefer to take on the warrior mantle as a sign of masculinity or some misguided attempt to protect the Ummah. No, there is no protection of Islam in such barbaric acts, just a systemic dismantling of our values as Muslims.
