What have George W Bush, Oskar Lafontaine, Al Gore and Gerhard Schröder in common? All of them believe that poverty and lack of education are the cause of terrorism. All of them are wrong.
The perceptive observer might look at the professors’ and pastors’ children who joined the Red Army Faction and get the idea that a terraced house and A-levels could shield you from the temptation to become a terrorist.
The Americans seem to be wedded to the idea that there is a connection between an individual’s economic condition and the tendency to get sucked into terrorism. Homeland Defense chief Michael Chertoff has been quoted as saying that the 7/7 bombings in London show that Europeans have special problems with their Muslims. They are generally better integrated in the USA, therefore there is hardly any home grown terrorism there.
The good news for the Americans is that Muslims in the US are indeed better integrated. And the vast majority of them naturally want the same thing as their co-religionists in Germany, the UK, Spain, etc.: a good job and a better future for their children.
The bad news is that terrorism experts like Marc Sageman, Edwin Bakker, Alan Krueger and Robert Leiken have found that most Islamist terrorists have an above-average education and come from the middle classes, just like the majority of Muslims in the US.
Mohammad Atta’s al Qaeda cell in Hamburg consisted mainly of students with grants. All four bombers who hit London in 2005 came from the British middle class. And the suitcase bombers who set out to kill the rail passengers last year in revenge for insults to the Prophet were engineering students and, like German terror suspects Fritz G. and Daniel S., from good homes.
The medics who tried to set off car bombs at nightclubs in London and at Glasgow Airport were not from the lower classes.
It is the same in the US. The "Lackwanna Group" were a group of all-American footballing teenagers who were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for supporting al Qaeda and attending terror-training camps. In May of this year the FBI arrested six men who planned to bomb the Fort Dix US Army base with rocket launchers and machine guns in order to kill as many service and civilian personnel as possible. Two of the suspects owned a middle-class workshop and others worked in the service sector.
Other failed terrorist attacks in the past few years were aimed at John F Kennedy Airport and the subway in New York, and at Los Angeles International Airport and the ears Tower in Chicago.
A survey by the Pew Institute in May this year revealed that 36 per cent of US Muslims were worried about the rise of Islamism in their country. 13 per cent said that suicide attacks could be justified in the defense of Islam, and 5 per cent had a positive opinion of al Qaeda.
Even if 95 per cent of Muslims are patriotic Americans, that leaves enough Islamists to join the jihad for a crude melange of reasons.
The insistence on the idea that personal poverty and lack of education are the causes of terrorism does not have to mean that US homeland policy needs to concentrate on travel restrictions on Britons of Pakistani origin or the fortification of the Mexican border. The American dream itself could well become the American nightmare.
http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/news/article.php?id=1976
oct 31
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