Terrorism bred from hate, not despair

Back in 2003, a stir was caused by this New York Times op-ed that, seemingly flying in the face of logic, argued that poverty doesn’t cause terrorism:

The stereotype that terrorists are driven to extremes by economic deprivation may never have held anywhere, least of all in the Middle East. New research by Claude Berrebi, a graduate student at Princeton, has found that 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers are from impoverished families, while about a third of the Palestinian population is in poverty. A remarkable 57 percent of suicide bombers have some education beyond high school, compared with just 15 percent of the population of comparable age.

This evidence corroborates findings for other Middle Eastern and Latin American terrorist groups. There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society’s elites, not the dispossessed.

Impossible, people said. That can’t be right. It just doesn’t seem logical that people would strap bombs to their bodies and blow themselves up unless they were driven to it by total, utter hopelessness. Despite the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were far from poor, people simply didn’t want to believe it.

Now, two years later and the debate has been reignited with the London terror attacks and the realization that the bombers were British. Meryl points to an article in the Washington Post that discusses how the 7/7 terrorists were not products of poverty or despair, but middle-class, educated and privileged:

What will stop this revolt of privileged Muslims? One possibility is that it will be checked by the same process that derailed the revolt of the rich kids in America after the 1960s — namely, the counter-revolt of the poor kids. Poor Muslims simply can’t afford the rebellion of their wealthy brethren, and the havoc it has brought to the House of Islam. For make no mistake: The people suffering from jihadism are mostly Muslims.

This follows a discussion I was having on a web forum – yet another variation on the tired, endless debate on the “root causes” of terrorism and the people who argue that if we could just solve world poverty, we’d get rid of the recruits for all the jihad training camps in one fell swoop.

Now, I’m all for solving world poverty. It’s a nice dream, and it’s great that beauty queens get up and promise to attain it – along with world peace – in pageants around the world. But it’s time for us to realize once and for all that the notion that terror comes from poverty is utter hogwash.

Increasingly, terrorists aren’t poor people with nothing to lose, blowing themselves up because their lives are so miserable. The 9/11 bombers were engineers and scientists with American educations and jobs. The 7/7 bombers were also educated middle-class Britons. These weren’t people at the end of their ropes. They weren’t motivated by desperation. No, these are people born or educated in our cultures who are, for some reason, turning against it and deciding instead to attack it.

So if the terrorist aren’t being motivated by poverty, then perhaps they’re motivated by lack of freedom? That’s a fine theory as it goes, suits the Bush agenda of spreading democracy nicely, and works well when we look at terrorists in autocratic regimes. But how can you explain the British bombers, who lived in a very free society and chose to attack it? How do you explain the fact that the most extremist wings of Islamist political groups are emerging in Western countries?

This CBC column starts off well enough in doing just that, before taking the typical CBC turn and arguing that the world should capitulate to the terrorists’ demands to make them less angry. But let’s ignore that for a moment and focus on the actual valid points being made here (and yes, there are a few):

Go to any university campus in Canada’s larger cities and you’ll see the first seeds of a conservatism being born in young Muslims. For example, at the University of Toronto’s Muslim Students’ Association, male members won’t make eye contact with the females, they won’t address them, won’t sit next to them, and, worst of all, the female students pray behind the male students, even though in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, men and women pray side by side.

This separation between the genders is not happening at the universities in Karachi, Cairo or Dhaka, but for some reason, it is happening among Muslims in the West. While these “social regressions” may not seem like a big deal, they are emblematic of a larger trend towards rejecting everything that is western.

Like I said, from there the article isn’t much help, because it goes off into its appeasement arguments quite predictably for something published by the CBC.

So then what’s the solution? If they are blowing stuff up not because they’re poor, desperate or oppressed but because they’re comfortable, educated and free, then what’s the next step in the war on terror? How can we fight people who know our culture, understand it, are born and raised in it even, and then turn on it so vehemently? If we want to identify and fight the true “root causes” of terror, where do we go from here?

There is an interesting small point in the CBC article that perhaps wasn’t focused on enough:

Ali says that these youth just want to have a voice that opposes foreign occupation and wars in their countries but, unfortunately, moderate Muslim leadership is lacking, so they join hard-core fundamentalists groups, not necessarily because they are religious, but because it’s the only organized response out there.

I’d argue that right there is the starting point. The first and most pressing problem is a lack of a strong moderate Muslim leadership. We’ve all argued that the voices of moderation are too few and too weak to outweigh the voices of the extremists.

But this is a bit of a different spin on the issue. The argument here is that young people of any culture are just looking for a place to fit in, to get involved, to forge an identity. This is true of any culture in a multicultural society. Religious groups, community groups or social groups play very valuable roles in the lives of nearly everyone.

But if the only – or most readily available – options available to young Muslims are extremist political groups, then the indoctrination of this sort of hatred will only get worse.

Maybe that’s a place to start, then. An alternative voice. Another way for young Muslims to get involved in religious, community or political issues. Another sort of cultural identity, one that has nothing to do with hating the west or blowing stuff up. The one that everyone keeps assuring us exists, but that we see so little of. In short, “religion of peace” needs to be more than just a slogan used by Muslims to attempt to convince us on the outside; it needs to be what’s “cool” on the inside. It has to become cooler to be into peace than into militancy. After all, everyone has a need to belong somewhere. Maybe it’s time people started having better things to belong to.

I don’t know any of the the answers here. I don’t even know most of the questions. But maybe – just maybe – that’s a place to start.