madrassas/terrorism

This article in the NYTimes called "The Madrassa Myth" throws a lot of water on the conventional wisdom on terrorists and the roots of terrorism. Everyone (including me) says things like: if we don't get the Saudis to stop exporting Wahhabism through the Madrassas, we'll never see the end of religious zealots bent on destroying us. But the article's authors did research and found that few terrorists came out of the madrassa system. They say:

Like the view that poverty drives terrorism - a notion that countless studies have debunked - the idea that madrassas are incubating the next generation of terrorists offers the soothing illusion that desperate, ignorant automatons are attacking us rather than college graduates, as is often the case. In fact, two of the terrorists in our study had doctorates from Western universities, and two others were working toward their Ph.D.

I see a flaw: Even though the terrorists were not schooled at the madrassas, much of the extremist thinking that underpins their worldviews closely match what is taught in the madrassas. I think that encouraging religious extremism, when that's the ideology used by terrorists as the basis for murdering people, is unconscionable. It legitimizes their point of view along with their actions. I don't have trouble with people being religious fanatics, it's the religious fanatics who kill innocent people that I'm against. So, let's have less religious fanatics and hopefully fewer murderous ones.