The revelation came to light when lawyer Siti Kasim uploaded on her Facebook page photos from an Instagram user that depicted a teacher wearing a full face veil and little boys carrying toy guns and little girls in long headscarves and robes.

Siti asked in her Facebook “What kind of Islam do you think they are teaching the kids …? I hope the authorities will look into this….”

Our authorities responded with a statement that the kindergarten where the play-acting was carried out has been under police radar since last year and that the police are monitoring kindergartens nationwide to ensure they were not being used to train child soldiers.

That assurance is inadequate and meaningless.

How can the police possibly monitor the thousands of early education schools and teachers for content and activities related to religious extremism?

What is taking place in the tadika seems to be the nurturing of potential Islamic jihadists – a development which is probably taking place in many other privately and state operated Islamic tadikas throughout the country.

Religious indoctrination and exploitation of children

We have seen the exploitation of children by terrorist groups such as ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Pakistani Taliban who have used children to carry out their activities.

This exploitation of children by terrorist groups is not new. But the tendency of extremist religious groups to use children to carry out their activities is relatively recent. It has been postulated that the move is strategic as it provides heightened media attention, especially over social media, and allows terrorist groups to groom more loyal members.

It has also been noted that children are easier to indoctrinate and less likely to resist, since they do not fully understand their own mortality. Moreover, because children appear less suspicious, using them often leads to more successful missions.

For now, the phenomenon of child soldiers or terrorists has been confined to poorer countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Malaysia does not yet fit into the category of failed states where recruitment of children and their indoctrination and deployment for violent activities can take place in the open or clandestinely.

Although not a failed state, that does not mean that we should be complacent. This is because the link between childhood indoctrination and adult terrorist behavior in support of religiously sanctioned and ‘righteous’ causes has been well established.

Childhood indoctrination and terrorism link

Our dilemma with homegrown religious extremism – different from the failed state model – is akin to that found in developed nations such as Britain, France and Australia where some young children who grow up in relatively affluent households, totally different in conditions from their counterparts in poor countries such as Pakistan or Nigeria, share a common characteristic in being influenced by religious indoctrination during early childhood.

These children – and it must be emphasized that they comprise a small minority – for reasons that are not easy to fathom – at some later stage in their life become religious fanatics who have no compunctions with engaging in murderous activities to kill off the enemies of their faith, or whoever may be seen as an appropriate victim to call attention to their allegiance to their religion, and new found – but often long simmering – piety.

Besides family and friends, indoctrination and the inculcation of extremist and fanatical values in Britain has been found to emanate from Muslim private schools where religious education is said to deprive the students “from the chance of open minds and critical ways of thinking. It prevents them from accepting different points of view and turns them into nothing but dogmatic fanatics. This picture becomes serious under the Islamic education syllabus.”

This was stated in the New English Review.

The Malaysian tadika in the spotlight, Tadika Hidayah Bestari, may be staging a play which is perfectly in line with its Islamic education syllabus. But their message for the child performers appears to be not dissimilar to that of ISIS.

Recently an Australian Broadcasting Corporation news report on ISIS’s focus on indoctrination of children noted that the latest of the terror organization’s many propaganda videos featuring child fighters this time showed a purported 15-year-old suicide car bomber.

“It is the road to victory and Paradise, Allah willing. Let me just do the operation, because if I stay longer I might sin and the sins will increase,” the teenage bomber said in the 22-minute ISIS video “I know my opponents are apostates who left Allah and His Messenger and became loyal to America.”

According to a London based think tank,the Quilliam Foundation, during the past six months alone, minors have appeared in 250 ISIS messages, which have included a dozen releases depicting children as executioners of prisoners or “spies”.

When explaining the playacting, the headmistress of Tadika Hidayah Bestari disclosed that the play was held in 2014 in collaboration with a non-governmental organisation, the Malaysian Consultative Council of Islamic Organisations (Mapim), that had raised funds for war victims in Palestine and Syria.

“Mapim is a registered organisation. Parents who attended the play donated to Mapim, hoping the sum collected would help Palestinians. It is an annual event, where students will perform in plays.

“We will have slideshows and show videos of those affected by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to expose our pupils and their parents to the suffering that war victims go through,” she is reported to have said.

What this disclosure also reveals is an alarming situation of quasi-state and state bodies engaged in supporting and encouraging such early childhood brainwashing and indoctrination.

We should not be surprised that we will end up with large numbers of homegrown ISIS and other types of Islamic jihadists and wannabes, and the imminent and uncontrollable proliferation of religious terrorist activity, in our part of the world.

(Note: This is the first of a two part post on religious terrorism in Malaysia. The second will examine the socio-economic impact of religious terrorism.)

-http://www.theheatmalaysia.com