The Connection Between ISIS and Lack of Education

I've noted often that to thrive extremist forms of religion require ignorant and uneducated populations.  Hence why Christianity's main growth area at present is in the most backward regions of Africa.  It's also the reason that American Christofascists seek to gut education programs in America and rewrite text books to support their poisonous belief system which begins to disintegrate in the face of scientific and modern knowledge.  But religious extremism is not limited to Christian extremists as demonstrated by ISIS (or ISIL as it is sometimes called).  To survive Islamic extremism also needs ignorant and uneducated populations.  Apiece in the New York Times makes the case that to defeat ISIS not only must America and its allies use military might, but they also need to over time  attack the underlying basis for religious extremism: lack of educated populations.  Here are excerpts:

As we fight the Islamic State and other extremists, there’s something that President Obama and all of us can learn from them. For, in one sense, the terrorists are fighting smarter than we are.

These extremists use arms to fight their battles in the short term, but, to hold ground in the long run, they also combat Western education and women’s empowerment. They know that illiteracy, ignorance and oppression of women create the petri dish in which extremism can flourish.

That’s why the Islamic State kidnapped Samira Salih al-Nuaimi, a brave Iraqi woman and human rights lawyer in Mosul, tortured her and publicly executed her last week. That’s why the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai, then 15 years old, after she campaigned for educating girls. And that’s why Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria and announced that it would turn them into slaves.

In each case, the extremists recognized a basic truth: Their greatest strategic threat comes not from a drone but from a girl with a book. We need to recognize, and act on, that truth as well.

For similar reasons, the financiers of extremism have invested heavily in fundamentalist indoctrination. They have built Wahhabi madrassas in poor Muslim countries like Pakistan, Niger and Mali, offering free meals, as well as scholarships for the best students to study in the gulf.

Shouldn’t we try to compete?

Shouldn’t we use weapons in the short run, but try to gain strategic advantage by focusing on education and on empowering women to build stable societies less vulnerable to extremist manipulation?

[W]e’re not playing the long game, as the extremists are. We are vastly overrelying on the military toolbox and underemploying the education toolbox, the women’s empowerment toolbox, the communications toolbox. We’re tacticians; alas, the extremists may be better strategists.It’s not a question of resources, because bombs are more expensive than books. The United States military campaign against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL, will cost at least $2.4 billion a year and perhaps many times that

Obama seems to have dropped his 2008 campaign promise to establish a $2 billion global fund for education. And the United States gives the Global Partnership for Education, a major multilateral effort, less in a year than what we spend weekly in Syria and Iraq.

[T]he historical record of the last half-century is that education tends to nurture a more cosmopolitan middle class and gives people a stake in the system.

Girls’ education seems to have more impact than boys’ education, partly because educated women have markedly fewer children. The result is lower birthrates and less of a youth bulge in the population, which highly correlates to civil conflict.

I support judicious airstrikes in the short term against the Islamic State, but that should be only one part of a policy combating extremism.
So let’s learn from the extremists — and from those brave girls themselves who are willing to risk their lives in order to get an education. They all understand the power of education, and we should, too.

The USA never seems good at playing the long game.  We need to think in the long term as well as short term military action.  We also need to recognize the threat that our home grown extremists of every faith represent and oppose efforts to dumb down education and fill our text books with religious based fairy tales.  It's no coincidence that overall belief in Bible inerrancy directly correlates with one's low level of education.