{"id":53534,"date":"2016-03-01T03:00:17","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T03:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1\/site\/2017\/2\/1985\/nyt_op-ed_nicholas_kristof-my_friend_rafiullah_kakar_the_former_muslim_ext\/"},"modified":"2016-03-01T03:00:17","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T03:00:17","slug":"nyt_op-ed_nicholas_kristof-my_friend_rafiullah_kakar_the_former_muslim_ext","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=53534","title":{"rendered":"(NYT Op-ed) Nicholas Kristof&#8211;My Friend Rafiullah Kakar,, the Former Muslim Extremist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ultimately, Rafi\u2019s life was transformed because his eldest brother, Akhtar, pinched pennies and sent Rafi to the best public school in the family\u2019s home province, Balochistan. Rafi had an outstanding mind and rocketed to the top of his class. But he also fell under the spell of political Islam. A charismatic Islamic studies teacher turned Rafi into a Taliban sympathizer who despised the West.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI subscribed to conspiracy theories that 9\/11 was done by the Americans themselves, that there were 4,000 Jews who were absent from work that day,\u201d\u009d Rafi recalls. \u201cI thought the Taliban were freedom fighters.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve often written about education as an antidote to extremism. But in Pakistan, it was high school that radicalized Rafi. \u201cEducation can be a problem,\u201d\u009d Rafi says dryly.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/02\/21\/opinion\/sunday\/my-friend-the-former-muslim-extremist.html\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ultimately, Rafi\u2019s life was transformed because his eldest brother, Akhtar, pinched pennies and sent Rafi to the best public school in the family\u2019s home province, Balochistan. Rafi had an outstanding mind and rocketed to the top of his class. But<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=53534\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,40,50,42,201,101,111,168,119,426,98,155,343,108,148,34,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-watch","category-economics-politics","category-international-news-commentary","category-religion-news-commentary","category-asia","category-children","category-education","category-ethics-moral-theology","category-globalization","category-islam","category-marriage-family","category-other-faiths","category-pakistan","category-religion-culture","category-terrorism","category-theology","category-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}