vc318

Okay, the answer is not that simple so please read the article first before you respond.

Pakistani religious school releases Ga. teens - 07/11/2008 - MiamiHerald.com

Pakistani religious school releases Ga. teens
Posted on Fri, Jul. 11, 2008
By DORIE TURNER

ATLANTA --
Two American-born teens forced by their father to attend a religious school in Pakistan for nearly four years have returned home to Atlanta after a documentary filmmaker pushed for their release.

Noor and Mahboob Khan, now 17 and 16, arrived in Atlanta late Thursday from Jamia Binoria, a prominent madrassa in Karachi. The boys are featured in a new documentary "Karachi Kids" by filmmaker Imran Raza, set to be released next week.

The boys' father, Fazal Khan, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he sent them to the madrassa because he wanted them exposed to Islam. He said he had tried to bring his sons home but the boys couldn't get exit visas.

"I sent a ticket. But I couldn't get the paperwork," he told the Journal-Constitution on Wednesday. "I'm responsible for my children."

A woman who identified herself as the boys' sister answered the phone at the family's Norcross home Friday afternoon. She said her father and brothers weren't home and declined to comment further to The Associated Press.

Raza had been working to get the boys home when U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, got involved. In a July 4 visit to Pakistan, he asked President Pervez Musharraf to release the Khan brothers.

The teens were sent home just a few days later.

Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesman Richard Kolko declined to say whether the agency is questioning the Khan brothers. He said earlier in an e-mailed statement that the FBI helped coordinate the boys' return in conjunction with the U.S. State Department.

In a statement posted on the documentary's Web site on Thursday, Raza said he is grateful that Noor and Mahboob are home.

He said hundreds more American children remain in Pakistani madrassas - many of which are considered extremist Muslim schools that indoctrinate students with radical beliefs.

"This pipeline to jihad must be closed," Raza wrote on the Web site. Raza did not immediately return a call for comment by The Associated Press.

Raza traveled to Karachi after the July 7, 2005, terrorist attack in London that killed 52 subway and bus passengers. There he found Noor and Mahboob, who had come to the school the previous year.

The documentary follows the brothers, showing how their schooling affects them.

In the documentary's trailer, a young Noor talks about missing his home and family. He says waking up every day and realizing he's in Pakistan is like "a big punch."

"You don't know how badly I want to go back," he says. "If there was a plane right now, I'd just go step on it and go back to America."

But after a couple of years in the madrassa, Noor says he is glad his father sent him to the school. He says he doesn't believe Muslims were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Not one Jew died that day. That is what they say," he says in the film.

Ericka Pertierra, a producer for the documentary, said she hopes to help Noor and Mahboob reacclimate to living in the United States. After becoming involved in the film, Pertierra founded the South Asian Foundation for Education Reform to bring attention to radical madrassas recruiting and indoctrinating American boys with radical ideology.

She said she's identified 200 American boys in 22 madrassas, but there are many more madrassas in Pakistan.

"Noor and Mahboob are just the tip of the iceberg," she said.

I didn't have the link to the other article where the mother stated that she was very much against her kids going to Pakistan because she feared what type of teaching they were going to get their. So, my question to you is:

Are children and adults a direct product of their environment? Meaning, should the U.S. prevent or flag people who visit where terrorism is common or where ideals hold a possible threat to the country? Also, should these two teens have been allowed to return to the United States after being in Pakistan for so long? Should the type of teaching they received be a concern?

Please share your thoughts.

sunnykerr

Of course, that type of teaching is a HUGE concern. It's nothing but terrorist propaganda and inculcation. Students who are told every day patently vicious lies and who have no way of finding out differently for themselves... how can they possibly grow up to believe differently than what they were told? Heck, how can they ever hope to grow up at all since it's clear that they're being groomed to blow themselves up sooner rather than later?

I do think that there's probably a threshold somewhere. A point of no return. For people who've attended these schools.

But I don't think there should be a general policy taken with regards to every and all individuals who have been to these regions or studied in these schools. Time changes people. Seeing the world may change them as well.

I do think it may be wise to keep tabs on them, making sure their psychological welfare is attended to, if needed.

But if we decide that the environment in those places leaves them with no other options than to grow up to be terrorists, then surely the remedy is to move them to new places where other ideas may be introduced to them.

If they're nurtured to be terrorists there, we have to hope that they can be nurtured in a new direction here.

vc318

The U.S. doesn't even question if a child enrolled in public school is a U.S. citizen or not so these children take whatever their beliefs may be and share them amongst others. Then starts the hate groups and before you know it, there's another school attack. But as in the case with these teens, they weren't even allowed to leave Pakistan until someone high-up from the U.S. helped the kids to come back. Other countries give people who visit other places the riot act before they even go on a plane. Maybe that's a course of action we should consider.

sunnykerr

I don;t know... unless times have changed dramatically since I was a child, it's very hard to maintain a radically different opinion in a public school. I spent most of second grade utterly convinced that I was going to this bad, bad place called hell when I was going to die because I didn't know that my parents weren't my real parents, but that a man and a woman I'd never met, called Joseph and Mary, were actually my true parents.

And I may be woefully ignorant, but aren't most school attacks the results of bully victims not knowing how to channel their feelings about that?

I completelly agree that a social worker of some sort should be keeping an eye on these children. It sounds like they went through something very traumatic. I don't think that preventing them from integrating the public school system (or putting restrictions on them) is the solution, as that only reinforces their (heretofore only suspected) feeling of marginalization and alienation. And that's where we go wrong today, I feel, whether the kids in question have been exposed to radical ideologies or not.

Besides, a lot of kids grow out of things. Just look at Jesus Camp. Not everyone grows up to hold the radical beliefs they held as children.