The Kingdom has witnessed several terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of scores of innocent people over the past few years. Had not the security authorities foiled numerous other plots, they too would have had bloody outcomes. All these attacks were perpetrated by Saudi citizens.
It has been pointed out that several former terrorists who had completed counseling and rehabilitation programs carried out by the Ministry of Interior have returned to their old camps upon release from jails. They have either rejoined their former benefactors or other dicier groups. Some of them are minors who are being influenced by the preachers of extremism. It has been very easy for them to lure youngsters into their fold through their venomous speeches.
The youngsters are being brainwashed by the so-called religious sheikhs and have no compunction about the consequences of the heinous acts they carry out upon instructions from their terror masters.
The only way to stamp out this scourge is to deal these sheikhs with an iron hand. These minors have embraced the deviant ideology in the way it was advocated to them by these sheikhs. They have been indoctrinated so much so that they are not ready to listen to anyone except their ideologues.
As a first step in our fight against extremism, we must exterminate these purveyors of deviant ideologies. These people in the guise of religious sheikhs label anyone who disagree with them as infidel and permit bloodletting from the pulpits or through posts in social networking sites. Some of these sheikhs are university professors who incite young people and encourage them to travel to conflict zones to join fighting. They succeed in brainwashing young people to the extent that no amount of counseling will have any effect on them.
The experiment in Egypt is a good example to follow in this respect. When terror attacks intensified in Egypt in the 1990s, the security authorities there launched a massive crackdown against extremist groups. Their leaders were arrested and put on trial on a massive scale, forcing several of them to abandon extremist camps and their deviant ideologies. Many young people followed suit and subsequently violence in the country subsided to a great extent.
There should not be any leniency toward the exponents of deviant ideologies. The authorities must force them to abandon their exhortations, which have been pivotal in misleading young minds and luring them into the fold of extremists.
