Posted on 04/30/2019 6:36:30 PM PDT by SJackson
It turns out that the Islamist terrorists who slaughtered more than 350 people in Sri Lanka came from one of that country’s wealthiest families. This news will surely come as a surprise to those who have become accustomed to hearing political leaders and pundits claim that poverty is what drives young Muslims to become terrorists.
The whole premise behind the more than $10 billion that the United States gave to the Palestinian Authority from 1994 to 2017 was that Palestinian unemployment leads to Palestinian terrorism — so we better give them money, and lots of it.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has reduced that aid, at least for now. Tragically, some Democrats in Congress are urging the administration to renew the aid. It seems that they haven’t learned anything from history — that is, the long history of well-to-do, educated Palestinian Arabs choosing to become terrorists. Not to mention the physicians and academics who head terrorist organizations.
Every few years, some American reporter in Jerusalem is shocked to discover this reality. I recall how The Washington Post’s Jerusalem bureau chief, William Booth, was positively stunned in 2016 when he realized that the latest Palestinian suicide bomber was affluent and educated.
The bomber, Abdel Hamid Abu Srour, “did not grow up in a refugee camp,” Booth reported. He was “a Palestinian preppy, the scion of a well-to-do and well-known clan of eight prosperous brothers, who own and operate a string of furniture outlets and are rich enough to take their young sons for holidays in Jordan and set them up with their own shop selling clothes.”
One uncle, Mahmoud Abu Srour, told Booth: “We are financially comfortable, you could say very comfortable.” At a family gathering to mourn Abu Srour’s death, his teenage cousins “wore pricey watches, skinny jeans and fancy sneakers.”
Abu Srour wasn’t a high school dropout, either. When his grades in high school lagged (perhaps bomb-making was distracting him from his midterms), “he wanted to retake subjects and redo his exams.” He told relatives that he wanted to become a veterinarian.
In short, Booth concluded, the bomber “doesn’t fit the profile of a desperate Hamas operative.” But the only reason he didn’t “fit the profile” is that the profile was created by people like Booth, who make sociological assumptions that fit their preconceived political notions, but don’t necessarily have any basis in reality.
The same is true for other (non-Palestinian) Muslim terrorists. Don’t take my word for it; ask the World Bank. A couple of years ago, disillusioned former members of ISIS gave Western investigators some 22,000 internal ISIS documents. The records included biographical information regarding 4,000 foreigners who joined the terrorist group in 2013 and 2014. The World Bank assigned a team of experts to analyze the data. The final report made it clear that poverty was not the issue: “Daesh [ISIS] did not recruit its foreign workforce among the poor and less educated, but rather the opposite. … This result is consistent with a number of other studies that come to a similar conclusion: poverty is not a driver of radicalization into violent extremism.”
The report also found that ISIS terrorists are often highly educated: “These individuals are far from being uneducated or illiterate … 69% of recruits report at least a secondary education … a large fraction have gone on to study at university. Only 15% left school before high school and less than 2% are illiterate.”
Not only that, but ISIS killers are even more educated than their neighbors: “Foreign recruits from the Middle East, North Africa and South and East Asia are significantly more educated than what is typical in their region.”
And very few of them are unemployed: “The vast majority … of Daesh [ISIS] recruits from Africa, South and East Asia and the Middle East … declared having an occupation before joining the organization.”
Advocates of Palestinian statehood promote the poverty-causes-terrorism myth because it advances their agenda. It’s the theory of “give them stuff, and all will be well.” In Israel’s case, it’s “give them money, give them Israeli territory, give them a state.”
Myths die hard. But the evidence is overwhelming that poverty is not what causes Muslims — whether Palestinian or Sri Lankan — to become terrorists. It’s time to acknowledge the real causes of Arab and Muslim terrorism: radical Islam, Arab nationalist supremacy, and, of course, old-fashioned antisemitism.
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It fits the media and political view of they left. They won't stop.
Maybe they should use Mad Mo’, Sharia Islam and the Queer-ran to justify Jihad?
Poverty should not be used to justify anything.
Its not a virtue and its not a badge of honor. Its not a free pass and its not a license to steal. Its not an excuse to attack others and its not a reason to beeak our immigration laws.
It’s not poverty, it’s Islam.
Islam has always been a religion of conquest and slavery, murder and mayhem.
Mad Mo made it so.
The 9-11 terrorists that killed 3,000 Americans were not poor. - Tom
They were just following the fundamentals of Islam.
There is nothing radical, or hi Jacked. or extreme about doing what your God wants done. - Tom
In fact the vast majority of muzzie terrorists are from upper middle-class or even upper class families.
“Boo-hoo, they’re so poor with NO options!” is a load of BS.
The ones anchored to blowing sand and clouds of gnats..? Meh, they usually don’t know any better and mostly stay in “low simmer” mode.
But the ones with the budgets to TRAVEL..?
They behold just HOW much of the world they did NOT create and suffer an existential crisis:
“The Koran tells me the whole WORLD is mine, yet we are mere FOOTNOES..!”
And THEN there is much teeth-gnashing.
Poor dear. Tell you what: why not go out and murder some innocent people, that may make you feel a bit better.
It’s time to acknowledge the real causes of Arab and Muslim terrorism: radical Islam, Arab nationalist supremacy, and, of course, old-fashioned antisemitism.
It is NOT "radical Islam". Read the Holy Quran. It is good Muslims doing their duty as commanded in the Holy Quran.
It is hard to find a true translation in the USA as the English versions printed in the last 20 to 50 years have been changed to make it look like a "religion of peace".
A true translation is a blueprint for Jihad and war.
It’s neither poverty nor Islam. Robert Bork pegged it perfectly in one of his books from the early 1990s. He suggested that he single most destructive influence in a modern, affluent society is BOREDOM.
It would seem impossible for the religion to hang together were it not for its false peaces.
Arafat and Bin Laden were both billionaires. They didn’t get into terrorism because they were poor or put upon. They were filthy rich Islamonazis.
The members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang all came from rich or upper middle class families.
Well said.
By this logic, more terrorism would be a good thing. Terroristic slaughter as reparations. Or something.
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