IN MY SHOES: The Road Not Taken
Abdullah Thabit, a 33-year-old school administrator in Saudi Arabia, has written a book “The 20th Terrorist,” detailing his indoctrination as an extremist by public school teachers who recruited him when he was “a lonely 15-year-old with a miserable home life who spent his spare time studying and herding goats while his wealthier friends rode around town on their bicycles,” according to The Washington Post.
Thabit describes how religious leaders and schoolteachers were actively engaged in turning young men into terrorists, and loosing them upon an unsuspecting world:
[E]xtremist teachers in Saudi public schools used apparently innocuous after-school activities such as soccer training, Koran memorization lessons and camping trips to separate teenage boys from their families and slowly indoctrinate them in takfiri ideology – the belief that all those who don't follow the same puritanical extremist views are infidels. …
“We were taught that our Islam was correct and everyone else, including our families, was going to hell, a hell that resembled a slaughterhouse. And I wanted to be one of the select few who made it into heaven.”
Being an excellent student, he was invited to join an elite group of classmates who had been handpicked for special extracurricular activities, such as soccer tournaments and overnight camping trips:
“If your parents or your community or your country don't provide you with [an identity] … and most Arab countries don't, you will look for it elsewhere. And these groups provide you with one. Your identity becomes that of a devout Muslim and that then transcends everything else about you.” …
“There was unconditional love and brotherhood and friendship and sacrifice, and spirituality.”
Thabit was ostracized after he refused to go to
“When you go through what I've been through, you realize you were kidnapped, and you have to learn to live and taste and feel, all over again.”
But Thibet’s book has also struck a raw nerve in his country, and he has also been accused of being a traitor and an infidel, and has received several death treats. When he started getting threatening phone calls at home, he immediately relocated his family nearly 500 miles north to Jiddah.
He still gets death threats: “They are like a mafia, a gang, and I am revealing their secrets. They want to silence me.”
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