Brilliant Strategy for Defeating Fundamentalists

We have a saying back home that says you cure a dog bite with dog hair. I think the equivalent in the United States is fight fire with fire. Neither of the expressions are supposed to be applied literaly. This is something that the United States often forgets when it attempts to fight terrorism with terror.

"If you beat these people up they become more stubborn. If you hit them, they will enjoy the pain and find something good in it - it is a part of their ideology. Instead, what we must do is erase what they have been taught and explain to them that terrorism will only harm Yemenis' jobs and prospects." says Faris Sanabani, a former adviser to President Abdullah Saleh and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Observer, a weekly English-language newspaper.

Or in the words of Mr. al-Hitar whose radically different approach to fighting Islamic fundamentalism played a key role in transforming Yemen (click on title to read full article).

"If you study terrorism in the world, you will see that it has an intellectual theory behind it," says Hitar. "And any kind of intellectual idea can be defeated by intellect."

Brilliant!! I'd love to see this approach used more widely when fighting fundamentalism of any kind!