Soccer Dad

High class terror

That Doctor would be part of a Jihadist plot shouldn't be surprising.

Daniel Pipes addressed the issue in 2002, God and Mammon: does poverty cause militant Islam?

But the empirical record evinces little correlation between economics and militant Islam. Aggregate measures of wealth and economic trends fall flat as predictors of where militant Islam will be strong and where not. On the level of individuals, too, conventional wisdom points to militant Islam attracting the poor, the alienated and the marginal-but research finds precisely the opposite to be true. To the extent that economic factors explain who becomes Islamist, they point to the fairly well off, not the poor.

Take Egypt as a test case. In a 1980 study, the Egyptian social scientist Saad Eddin Ibrahim interviewed Islamists in Egyptian jails and found that the typical member is "young (early twenties), of rural or small-town background, from the middle or lower middle class, with high achievement and motivation, upwardly mobile, with science or engineering education, and from a normally cohesive family." In other words, Ibrahim concluded, these young men were "significantly above the average in their generation"; they were "ideal or model young Egyptians." In a subsequent study, he found that out of 34 members of the violent group At-Takfir w'al-Hijra, fully 21 had fathers in the civil service, nearly all of them middle-ranking. More recently, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service found that the leadership of the militant Islamic group Al-Jihad "is largely university educated with middle-class backgrounds." These are not the children of poverty or despair.

Other researchers confirm these findings for Egypt. In a study on the country's economic troubles, Galal A. Amin, an economist at the American University in Cairo, concludes by noting "how rare it is to find examples of religious fanaticism among either the higher or the very lowest social strata of the Egyptian population." When her assistant in Cairo turned Islamist, the American journalist Geraldine Brooks tells of her surprise: "I'd assumed that the turn to Islam was the desperate choice of poor people searching for heavenly solace. But Sahar [the assistant] was neither desperate nor poor. She belonged somewhere near the stratosphere of Egypt's meticulously tiered society."

Scott Atran - many of whose views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I disagree with noticed this too:

As logical as the poverty-breeds-terrorism argument may seem, study after study shows that suicide attackers and their supporters are rarely ignorant or impoverished. Nor are they crazed, cowardly, apathetic or asocial. If terrorist groups relied on such maladjusted people, "they couldn't produce effective and reliable killers," according to Todd Stewart, a retired Air Force general who directs the Ohio State University program in international and domestic security.

In the suicide bombing of a cafe in Tel Aviv last week that killed three bystanders, for instance, the bomber and the man accused of being his accomplice grew up in Britain, in relatively prosperous circumstances, and attended college.

The Princeton economist Alan Krueger and others released a study in 2002 comparing Lebanese Hezbollah militants who died in violent action to other Lebanese of the same age group. He found that the Hezbollah members were less likely to come from poor homes and more likely to have a secondary school education.

Nasra Hassan, a Pakistani relief worker, interviewed nearly 250 aspiring Palestinian suicide bombers and their recruiters. "None were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed," she reported in 2001. "They all seemed to be entirely normal members of their families."

The fact that it's still surprising that Jihadists come from the ranks of the middle and upper middle class is unfortunate as Transterrestial Musings observes

We are winning the war on the ground, and losing it where it really matters, in the media, and political establishment. The enemy understands the nature and value of their information war, but our side remains clueless.

Barry Rubin (among others) gives a history of other doctors who made careers out of terrorf.

Indeed, the No. 2 leader of al Qaeda is Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri - who was previously a stalwart of the Muslim Brotherhood in his native Egypt. Zawahiri made the connections that led to his role in al Qaeda when he went to Afghanistan in 1980 to provide medical care for jihadists fighting the Soviets. Later, he was a key architect of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed hundreds of innocents, and of the 9/11 attacks.

Other Islamist MDs include two recent leaders of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. Abdel Aziz Rantisi graduated first in his class from an Egyptian university in pediatrics; he succeeded slain cleric Ahmad Yassin as Hamas' chief in March 2004 - only to perish himself a month later. After him came Mahmoud al-Zahar (who had helped found Hamas in 1987), an Egyptian-trained surgeon who today is the most powerful man in the Gaza Strip.

Even before the rise of Islamism, there were secular doctor-terrorists. Dr. George Habash, a founder and for three decades leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), is now still active though enjoying his semi-retirement in Syria. The PFLP was one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups in history, with exploits such as a 1978 attack at Orly Airport in Paris and the 2002 shooting of five (including a mother and three children) in Itamar on the West Bank.

The name he (and others) left out was that of Fahti Shkaki the founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was killed on Malta, apparently by Israeli agents.

But the infamous "Engineer" Yihye Ayyash was an engineer. And many of the leaders are similarly university educated and not from the lower (economic) classes.

There is a temptation to argue as Michael Ledeen did recently (and seconded by Yid With Lid) that suicide terrorists aren't very smart.

But there's evidence otherwise.

Daniel Pipes wrote in Arafat's Suicide Factory

Every inquiry into Palestinian suicide attacks, and especially Nasra Hassan's remarkable report in a recent issue of The New Yorker, finds that these do not just happen spontaneously but result from a large and sophisticated infrastructure.

This infrastructure exists for one reason: to make normal men want to die. Because Islamic law prohibits suicide, a suicidal person cannot be recruited to go on a mission. Rather, it is (perversely) necessary to dispatch only those who are not suicidal.

Islamic Jihad, which along with Hamas trains the suicide killers, explains: "We do not take depressed people. If there were a one-in-a-thousand chance that a person was suicidal, we would not allow him to martyr himself. In order to be a martyr bomber, you have to want to live." The same strange logic applies for Hamas, which rejects anyone "who commits suicide because he hates the world."

Convincing healthy individuals to blow themselves up is obviously not easy, but requires ideas and institutions. The process begins with the Palestinian Authority (PA) inculcating two things into its population, starting with the children: a hatred of Jews and a love of death. School curricula, camp activities, TV programming and religious indoctrination all portray Israelis in a Nazi-style way, as sub-human being worthy of killing; and then deprecate the instinct for self-preservation, telling impressionable young people that sacrificing their lives is the most noble of all goals.

Though it's counterintutive, suicide terrorists too, came largely from among the successful, not the lower classes. The training requires a large degree of discipline and brainwashing. A stupid or unskilled suicide terrorist is not likely to be successful.

It is time to realize that it isn't the desperation of the Palestinians that leads them to terror. It is their hatred of Israel. Until that changes we can't look forward to peace in the Middle East.

terrorism, israel.