Poor oppressed Jihadists?
By buzzbrockway Posted in National Security — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Promoted by Jeff. As has been demonstrated time and time again - most recently in this case - the economic excuse for terrorism is a patently false one, and is primarily the refuge of those who are too afraid or too out of touch to accept that there really are people who simply kill for a living (outside of the US military ;-)
Mohammed Atta and many of the 9/11 hijackers were neither poor nor oppressed, yet poverty is often listed as a root cause of terrorism. As it turns out, two of the terrorists arrested for involvement in the failed London car bombings and the Glasgow attack were doctors.
Read on...
From Sky News via Jihad Watch:
Two of the five terror suspects being held in the wake of the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow are believed to be hospital doctors working in the UK.
The majority of the five terror suspects being held in police custody in connection with bomb attacks in London and Glasgow are not British and at least one is still at large, according to Sky sources.
Sky sources believe one of the men arrested at Glasgow airport and a 26- year-old man arrested on the M6 with a 27-year-old woman in Cheshire are both doctors.
Tim Blair says this of the Glasgow airport attackers, who carried out their deed on a day when the airport was packed with families leaving on holiday:
When it comes to mass murder, these chaps follow the old seafaring notion: women and children first.
Along these lines I'd like to add this: Can we finally get it through our heads not every Jihadists need be directly linked to bin Laden to qualify as a terrorist? The radical ideology spread by bin Laden and his ilk can be adopted by anyone who takes a liking to it. Yet our media immediately asks, when something like this happens "are they linked to al-Qaeda?" as if the threat or the carnage doesn't really matter if no direct link is found. It's the radical ideology these terrorists are attracted to, not necessarily the person of bin Laden. While bin Laden may be a hero to some of these twisted freaks, I dare say most Jihadists are more interested in what bin Laden says than who he is.
Also posted at the Buzz Blog.
and there are a few other groups who engage is terrorism but not on the scale these Jihadists do, but for the most part the world's poor just want to stop being poor - not kill people.
Buzz
Buzz Blog
yet poverty is often listed as a root cause of terrorism.
I'm looking for your thesis, but it's not explicit. Are you saying it's not a root cause because some terrorists are well-to-do? That's just bad logic ("pilot error is not a root cause of airline accidents because some airline accidents are not caused by pilot error.")
I agree with you that poverty doesn't force one to be a terrorist, because I see millions of poor Muslims who are not terrorists.
To deny any relationship, however, is to be as close-minded as to deny a relationship between poverty and street gang activity. Surely it's not all there is to it, but it would be foolish to ignore the correlation when there's a lot to be learned from it.
But I'm curious--who exactly is saying the terrorists are fighting because they are poor?
Peace Corps Part of Edwards Terror Plan
The plan Mr. Edwards presented yesterday — which he dubbed "A Strategy to Shut Down Terrorists and Stop Terrorism Before It Starts" — calls for a 10,000-person "Marshall Corps" to deal with issues ranging from worldwide poverty and economic development to clean drinking water and micro-lending. He said investing in those areas would shore up weak nations and help ensure that terrorism does not take root there. That, he said, would allow the country to stop potential terrorists before they even join the ranks.
Buzz
Buzz Blog
A massive increase in terrorism worldwide coincided exactly with the creation and implementation of the UN, Unicef, the World Bank, the IMF, and the Peace Corp.
So what can we conclude from that Mr. Edwards?
Liberalism Causes Terror!
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
But he's still not saying terrorists are fighting because they're poor. Is anyone? The closest to that I can see is number of right-wing sites that say terrorists are envious of our wealth.
The supposition is that impoverished areas tend to be fruitful for producing and recruiting terrorists, a notion that's not particularly far-fetched. These are the people with the least to lose, and the most to gain, and haven't seen much benefit from America's presence. If I were recruiting, that's exactly where I'd go.
Personally, I'm with Edwards on making sure terrorism doesn't take root in new places. And from what I've seen, the Bush administration plan is strong on smashing existing terrorists, but weak on stopping new ones from forming.
I think Edwards' (and Romney's similar) plans have merit, and don't require an abandonment of the administration's current plan to execute. I would like to see us change from less "smash" to more "smash and prevent creation of".
and the scutwork jobs those doctors were doing. Those neurologists, what a bunch of lowlifes.
From the French Revolution, Lenin and his crew, etc. - they were not from the "downtrodden class" - these were educated individuals with the leisure time to develop their corrupt ideology. Thus it's not surprising that idle prosperity has a higher correlation with terrorism than abject poverty. Not to mention it takes lots of money to run a terrorist organization.
who the targets of most revolutions are, it is the hated middle class. So all the revolutionaries and wannabes are either elitists, academics, or their poor puppets within the proletariat
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
Cult of Contempt
from The Times (UK)"In earlier times, the social restrictions of conservative societies, especially on relations between men and women, would have been largely accepted by men who had little outlet for their emotions. But in the digital age, the contrast with more liberal societies is quickly apparent and often agonising. The result is a prurient interest in the tawdriest aspects of Western life and a subsequent self-loathing, confusion and misogyny that blames women and Western society for undermining Muslim 'purity'. Their frustrations are exploited by the politically ambitious, using causes such as Iraq and the Palestinians as motivators.
I track Saudi Arabia's decades long, multi-billion dollar campaign to promote Wahhabi Islam world-wide on my blog, Wahaudi.
http://wahaudi.blogspot.com
about the lack of truth in the "poverty drove them to terrorism" angle. While one can argue multiple causes that drive people to follow radical Muslim views, the whole poverty angle seems false, as you point out. People who desire more information on this should read a book such as "The Looming Tower," which does a decent job of tracing the roots of modern terrorism, and shows how middle and even upper class men helped take part in terrorism and its related ideological movements.
I'm likely more liberal than most of you, so I should probably be biased toward the "poverty made them do it" argument, but the facts just aren't there. In fact, I wish it were that easy--that is, I wish we could establish a direct cause between poverty and terrorism, if only to have a simpler view of our enemies and a bumper slogan motto to drum up more support among liberals for anti-terrorism efforts. But we can't, and must live with the reality that relatively well-off and highly educated people do turn into murderous, nihilistic radicals, and create our strategies accordingly. Frankly, calls for large-scale anti-poverty to combat terrorism--ideas I've heard often in liberal circles--seem rather beside the point and even counter productive, giving the limited resources we have to spend on our global war efforts.