Saudi Female Journalist Asks: Don't These Terrorists Emerge From Our Environment?

Now, this is something completely different. A Saudi TV newscaster spent three minutes of a broadcast on April 3 lambasting her fellow Muslims for their refusal to admit the connection between Islam and Islamic extremist terrorism.

We witness people competing in an attempt to be the first to prove that everything that is happening has nothing to do with the Muslims, and that the terrorists are highway robbers and homeless alcoholics and drug addicts. We all know that the number of the homeless in Europe is very high. They sleep in the streets and beg for alms, and some of them are alcoholics or drug addicts, but we do not expect these addicts or criminals to even consider coming here and blowing up a mosque or a street in our city. It is we who blow ourselves up. It is we who blow up others.

Why do we shed our own conscience? Why do the sheikhs, the pundits, the journalists, and all the Arab officials insist upon [not] using their conscience when they point to the perpetrators? Don't these perpetrators emerge from our environment? Don't their families belong to our society? Didn't anyone you know - someone from your city, a neighbor, someone from your street, a relative, a nephew, a grandson, a father, or a mother - go to Syria or Iraq to wage Jihad?

After the abominable Brussels bombings, it's time for us to feel shame and to stop acting as if the terrorists are a rarity. We must admit that they are present everywhere, that their nationality is Arab, and that they adhere to the religion of Islam. We must acknowledge that we are the ones who gave birth to them, and who have made them memorize the teachings of all the Salafi books. We must admit that it is the schools and universities that we established that told them the others are infidels.

I've read that Nadine Al-Budair is a Saudi journalist and women's rights activist (yes, both of those things at the same time) who lives in Dubai, and was formerly a presenter on the Arabic-language American television channel Alhurra. That channel is owned by the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, which is funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

If the USG has had anything to do with her career, then that is exactly how I would want my tax money spent.