Soccer Dad

Neither poverty nor ignorance

Brain Terminal has an excellent post Who are the terrorists? in which he argues.

As I said, today’s conflict with the Jihadists arises from a profound cultural difference, not from America’s past foreign policy or failure to hand out even more money around the globe. But for some reason, many of us prefer to point the finger back at ourselves and ignore the real source of the problem. Simply put, finding fault with other cultures just isn’t politically correct.

This is a point Daniel Pipes made in God and Mammon

Even Islamists who make the ultimate sacrifice and give up their lives fit this pattern of financial ease and advanced education. A disproportionate number of terrorists and suicide bombers have higher education, often in engineering and the sciences. This generalization applies equally to the Palestinian suicide bombers attacking Israel and the followers of Osama bin Laden who hijacked the four planes of September 11. In the first case, one researcher found by looking at their profiles that: "Economic circumstances did not seem to be a decisive factor. While none of the 16 subjects could be described as well-off, some were certainly struggling less than others." In the second case, as the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz sardonically put it, the biographies of the September 11 killers would imply that the root cause of terrorism is "money, education and privilege." More generally, Fathi ash-Shiqaqi, founding leader of the arch-murderous Islamic Jihad, once commented, "Some of the young people who have sacrificed themselves [in terrorist operations] came from well-off families and had successful university careers." This makes sense, for suicide bombers who hurl themselves against foreign enemies offer their lives not to protest financial deprivation but to change the world.

What Pipes notes elsewhere in Shakespeare with Sharia, these are people who are alienated from Western culture who, despite everything, are steeped in that very culture.

More broadly, Islamic radicals tend to be well acquainted with the West (the main exceptions are those in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan), having learned its languages, studied its cultures, or lived there. A disproportionate number of them (such as the heads of the Turkish and Jordanian Islamist organizations) are engineers. In a statement from his Manhattan jail cell, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing pointedly cited Newton's laws of physics.

This points to an important, if little known fact: however much Islamists hate the West, they are deeply connected to it. They are not peasants living in the remote countryside, but urbanized, thoroughly modern individuals, often university graduates. As Westernized individuals coping with modern life, they seek the West's learning and admire its efficiency.

As Brain Terminal observes, when the diplomats and politicians look for diplomatic solutions they are misunderstanding the nature of the enemy. That is potentially fatal.

Terror, Islamism, Western Culture