Poverty Breeds Terrorism?

23 responses so far

• 1 franco 2 // Dec 26, 2009 at 5:10 pm

  Most people are convinced you are right. The only people who are still trying to advance the meme that poverty and oppression breeds terrorists are leftists, who don’t believe their own theories – they just hope others do.

• 2 aDude // Dec 26, 2009 at 6:00 pm

  I believe we just had this discussion. I will post what I wrote before:

  Most terrorism that I’ve seen stems not from poverty, but from a sense that a glorious past has somehow been taken away. In same cases, it is a very long ago past, but seems as real and as important to the present day as 9/11 seems to us.

  Ever notice how even though the Civil War was a century and a half in the past, there are a lot of places in the Deep South where they still haven’t gotten over it? That longing for the antebellum world led to the greatest terrorism movement in American History – the Ku Klux Klan. During it’s reign of terror thousands of American citizens were lynched, burned, shot, blown up, or otherwise murdered.

  England conquered Ireland a half a millennium ago, yet the Irish Republican Army was still fighting in the 20th century, achieving success in the southern counties in 1920, while the major fight in Northern Ireland continued until the Irish Accords of 1997 (and some renegade factions still fight today).

  Ever notice how the threat we face is not from Turkish Muslims, or Indonesian Muslims, or Bangladeshi Muslims, but very specifically from Arabic Muslims? Once again, they had a flourishing and advanced civilization while Western Europe was in the Dark Ages. (Ever notice how our numeric system is based on “Arabic” numerals, and advanced mathematics is called Al-gebra (yes, algebra is an Arabic word). In literature and medicine the Arabic world was well ahead of the rest of the planet.

  But in the 15th century the Arabic lands were conquered by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. While the Turks are Muslim, their system of government stifled the Arabic culture for centuries. Much later, starting in the late 18th century and going well into the 20th century, European countries began to pick off the pieces of the Ottoman “sick man of Europe.” It wasn’t until my lifetime that most Arabic countries finally gained total independence.

  The damage was done. Western Europe emerged from its millennium in the darkness to achieve phenomenal success culturally, politically, economically, and scientifically. The Arabic lands had hardly progressed beyond that glorious era 500 years ago. Every Arab knows their history and their lost culture. And many Arabs feel a sense of frustration and anger that history somehow betrayed them. While it is irrational, some take this frustration out on the dominant culture – the West.

  If you want to understand the mind of an Arab terrorist, just visit the American South, or Northern Ireland, or the Basque region of Spain. It’s not poverty. It’s not ideology. It’s not religion. It’s history.

• 3 teabag // Dec 26, 2009 at 6:14 pm

  It’s not poverty it’s grievance. If other nations occupied the USA we would have our own terrorists. (we would call them freedom fighters). If people are aggrieved by actual hostile acts or occupation then they will fight back with what they have.

  In the case of poor (relatively) nations or sects that will be terrorism, because it’s cheap and effective. If you look at the relative cost of terrorism to AQ and the USA then you will get some understanding how effective they have been.

  For a tiny outlay they have cost this country upwards of two trillion dollars and 4000 service personnel killed. We are now indebted to China because of 9/11, Iran is now the prime nation in the middle east because of 9/11. A tiny band of men changed the history of the world for a cost of about $5000.

• 4 aDude // Dec 26, 2009 at 6:20 pm

  As for the present case, the terrorist is from Nigeria, a country which has had long internal struggles. There are tribal and cultural differences

  Like Northern Ireland, religion has become a convenient way to identify ethnic groups. Half of the country is Muslim (mostly in the north), and half is not (it’s a little over 40% Christian, mostly in the south and east). But even here, religion is only part of the story. There have been tribal and cultural differences between the various groups, culminating in the horrible civil war in the late 60’s as the province of Biafra tried to break away. This led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, and mass starvation. Indeed during that time if you wanted to say that someone looked sick you would say that they “look like a Biafran refugee.”

  How does that apply to the present terrorist? He is educated (although not very well educated as to the particulars of aerospace engineering, apparently). He comes from a part of the world that feels, rightly or wrongly, that they have a grievance, and in looking for an outlet for that anger he found Al Qaeda. He has no doubt been taught that the problems of Nigeria stem from Western colonialism, and that to strike out at the United States is the best way to strike back at his history.

  Poverty has nothing to do with it.

• 5 sinz54 // Dec 26, 2009 at 8:32 pm

  teabag:
  

  If other nations occupied the USA we would have our own terrorists. (we would call them freedom fighters).

  Western resistance movements didn’t do suicide bombing,
  and they avoided killing innocent civilians.

  Our Revolutionary War troops didn’t sail to Britain to kill British civilians.
  The French resistance, fighting the Nazis, didn’t travel to Germany to kill German civilians.

  The Irish Republican Army never committed an atrocity comparable to 9-11, even though they had the means to do so.

  And suicide-bombing has never been a Western feature.

  You should read the book “Carnage and Culture” sometime. Hanson shows quite convincingly that the way a people make war, is largely a product of their culture.

  No matter how much you were oppressed, I doubt you would have the nerve to shoot a little girl through the head at point blank range, like the Palestinian terrorists have done often.

• 6 sinz54 // Dec 26, 2009 at 8:53 pm

  aDude:
  

  It’s not ideology. It’s not religion. It’s history.

  I agree.

  But you omitted a very important part of that history: The defeat of the Muslims in their attempt to conquer Europe.

  The Muslims had been the aggressors since Mohammed incited them to jihad. They had swept into Spain (which they called Andalusia), and then invaded France. Charles Martel led the French in defense of their land, and stopped the Muslims cold at Tours, in the year 732.

  The Muslims tried to conquer Europe from another direction–by attacking Constantinople in the year 717. Again they got stopped, this time by the Byzantine Empire.

  Those two battles were the Muslims’ Stalingrad. They marked the high water mark of Muslim advances beyond the Middle East. After that, the Islamic Caliphates would be eclipsed by the West.

  What bothers them about the Ottoman Empire is not that they were conquered by it. What bothers them about the Ottoman Empire is that Turkey, the last major Muslim power, declared itself a republic in the 1920s, ending the dream of someday restoring the old Caliphate.

  It frosts the Middle East Muslims to this day that they failed to take Europe–and that their power had peaked as a result. To this day, extremists like Osama bin Laden continue to harp on their old dream of retaking Andalusia. And he has alluded to the time when Turkey became a republic as a tragedy for Islam.

• 7 teabag // Dec 26, 2009 at 9:34 pm

  Sinz,

  You are right that westerners don’t do suicide bombings, maybe we value our own lives too much. However resistance movements have done some pretty horrible things.

  The IRA almost succeeded in killing the entire British Cabinet including the Prime Minister (Blackpool). They planted bombs in city centers where families with children were wiped out (Warrington). They murdered Lord Mountbatten and members of his family. They were capable of horrific acts driven by grievance.

  They planted bombs in crowded public places like pubs (Manchester, Birmingham) in order to maim and kill as many as possible. They left huge bombs (Canary Wharf) That caused enormous damage and only by the grace of God were thousands not killed.

  IRA Terrorists were cowards, they planted bombs and ran away. At least the AQ terrorists are willing to die for their cause. That does not mean I sympathize or agree with them in the slightest.

  Our Revolutionary War troops didn’t sail to Britain to kill British civilians. That’s because it was a traditional War. Plus did they really have the means?

  The French Resistance were an Insurgent force. Their role was in disruption and making chaos. They did not really have the means to counter attack.

  You are right our culture does shape our responses to war. I truly believe that if we had paused and thought about 9/11 for a while instead of doing a knee jerk wholesale invasion that things would have worked out better. There were other ways of killing Bin Laden and his then fairly small group. I guess our culture called for massive retaliation. I understand the reasons for that but am not convinced it was the wise course of action.

• 8 Justin_Anderson // Dec 27, 2009 at 2:44 am

  Oh, Kapil, I can play this game, too.

  Timothy McVeigh was a Christian, therefore all Christians are domestic terrorists who will blow up federal buildings.

  Kind of silly, isn’t it?

• 9 jakester // Dec 27, 2009 at 4:32 am

  Oh puleez, not McVeigh AGAIN!
  He was neither a devout Christian. a member of a Xtain resistance group nor cited any scriptures or theology in justification. That makes about as much sense as if we called a man who violently robbed the bank for personal gain and excitement only was an Islamic terrorist because he had converted to Islam a while back. This is Islam, and this is the way they like to fight. Of course they neither invented terrorism or have a market on it, it’s just that they are the only ones who still actively use their religion to promote warfare, mainly on their religious rivals Muslim or not. Part of any modern or ancient warfare was to instill terror against the enemy’s civilians to disrupt production and sow panic.

  sinz54, VDH is a partisan hack, We used mass bombing raids on Germany and Japan, as well as on Italy and even occupied countries which killed countless millions of civilians. Some of them, the like the fire raids on Hamburg and Tokyo and the atomic bomb were designed to kill and terrorize civilians to break the nation’s will to resist. When we first got into that war, we condemned the enemy for initiating and carrying out mass bombing attacks on cities and unrestricted submarine warfare on the ocean against merchant shipping, at the end of the war, we became the masters in those two trades. How many bombs did we drop in Nam, Laos, Cambodia on basically non military targets, like a million plus? We are not Nazis or Hamas, but let’’s not dupe ourselves with some aw shucks we’re just good old boys who like to hand out chocolate and build schools. There is nothing worse than people who believe their own propaganda

  I don’t say this to justify these terrorists, they are the enemy and certainly are not avengers of our past wrongs, as if randomly killing civilians makes past dead one arise.

• 10 Saoirse // Dec 27, 2009 at 4:38 am

  teabag,

  You said about the IRA ”They left huge bombs (Canary Wharf) That caused enormous damage and only by the grace of God were thousands not killed.”

  It was due to the IRA giving a recognized codeword and warning to clear the area that thousands weren’t killed, not by the grace of God.

  You then say ”IRA Terrorists were cowards, they planted bombs and ran away”

  Did you want them to stand beside the bomb?

  Is it cowardly to drop bombs from planes and fly away? What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Almost 150,000 civilians murdered. That was cowardly and it certainly was Terrorism going by your own definition.

• 11 franco 2 // Dec 27, 2009 at 7:40 am

  Teabag
  ” IRA Terrorists were cowards, they planted bombs and ran away. At least the AQ terrorists are willing to die for their cause.”

  “At least” ??

  Here is another example of Judeo-Christian believer applying his own culture willy-nilly upon another. Muslims often proclaim, “We value death more than infidels value life” Us infidels, and I think you qualify as an infidel even more than I do, can’t wrap our heads around that concept, but it is literally true in some ways.

  They have a concept of martyrdom, (and this is also quite different than the Christian concept of martyrdom since Christians do not seek it out) whereby they get glory and their families are celebrated.
  It has little to do with “bravery”.

  It is the myopic, narrowminded leftists like teabag who insist on applying their cultural norms , that is, default Judeo-Christian beliefs, onto radical Islam. Interesting isn’t it?

• 12 Zilu // Dec 27, 2009 at 8:50 am

  I have no idea what ’causes’ terrorism (the discussion above is interesting, however), but the author of this ridiculous post really should hit the delete button on this one.

  Who does Kapil think he is refuting here? If looks like he’s trying to refute the position that poverty is a necessary condition for terrorism. But who in the world holds such a view (other than some fictional set of cartoonish liberals Kapil likes to whack at with his pen)? I can’t think of anyone. Perhaps Kapil can provide a link to where this strawman has actually been held by someone?

  Now I _have_ heard the view espoused that poverty is, ceterus paribus, a significant contributor to terrorism. But I don’t see how this ridiculous post refutes that position at all.

• 13 sinz54 // Dec 27, 2009 at 9:47 am

  Saoirse:
  

  Is it cowardly to drop bombs from planes and fly away? What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Almost 150,000 civilians murdered.

  It’s interesting you make that point.

  Hanson discussed that at length.

  From the Japanese perspective, the aerial bombing of their women and children by American fliers made those fliers cowardly war criminals. That’s why they had no compunctions against treating captured fliers harshly–torturing them and putting them on trial, all in contravention of the Geneva Convention.

  From the American perspective, strategic bombing wasn’t cowardly because American bombers were flying to their targets against heavy anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighter aircraft. (In the U.S. strategic bombing of Germany, fully one-quarter of U.S. fliers were killed by enemy action.) So Americans considered the fliers brave to fly through all those enemy defenses, and figured that the Japanese had a fighting chance to intercept the bombers if they could, so all’s fair in war.

  And let’s face it, there was a mutual bigotry operating too. The Japanese considered themselves a superior race, just like the German Nazis did. Inferior peoples, like the Americans, would get inferior treatment. But the feeling was mutual. The Americans considered the Japanese to be duplicitous, lying cheaters, based on their sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. And the Americans had been infuriated by the Bataan Death March and other reports of Japanese atrocities. Hence many Americans figured that the Japanese, even their civilian population, had it coming.

• 14 sinz54 // Dec 27, 2009 at 11:00 am

  Justin_Anderson:
  

  Timothy McVeigh was a Christian

  At his trial, McVeigh said he was an agnostic.

• 15 jakester // Dec 27, 2009 at 6:58 pm

  Sinz54,
  I have to agree with you on both above posts. That is what the liberal morons at HuffPost say all the time: McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima, McVeigh, Hiroshima. The Huffpost ninnies just banned me cause I said on that bomb thread that this guy was a Muslim just like all the other ones recently.
  On the other hand, even when you take into account what the Nips did in Nanking after the city surrendered, murdering 250K civilians with swords, bayonets, guns, clubs, which was greater than both a bombs together, using a-bombs even if it ended the war they started is hardly humanitarian either!

• 16 aDude // Dec 27, 2009 at 9:06 pm

  A minor note. From time to time I see references to suicide bombing as being somehow unique to Islamic terrorism. I would remind everyone of the kamikaze ethic of Imperial Japan during World War II. The one similarity, of course, is a religious belief that there will be reward in the afterlife for giving one’s life for the greater cause.

• 17 jakester // Dec 27, 2009 at 10:45 pm

  adDude
  true, dying for the emperor and Yamato was part of their creed, but that all ended when they saw where that was going to take them.

• 18 sinz54 // Dec 28, 2009 at 9:47 am

  jakester:
  

  On the other hand, even when you take into account what the Nips did in Nanking after the city surrendered, murdering 250K civilians

  The Japanese had their own racial theory just like the Germans did. To the average Japanese, a Chinese or a Korean was scum. They felt about the Chinese the way the Germans did about the Slavs.

  That made it real easy to rape, torture, and murder them.

  dying for the emperor and Yamato was part of their creed, but that all ended when they saw where that was going to take them.

  It didn’t end until their emperor told them to knock it off. In his Imperial Rescript of August 1945, the emperor told his people to accept the Allied ultimatum and cooperate peacefully with the Americans.

  The reason why America had such trouble in Iraq after the fall of the Saddam regime, is that no one from the Saddam government issued any such official proclamation. Remember that famous “52 card deck” of Iraqi officials? We caught or killed most of them–but we never got any formal surrender agreement, any formal statement suing for peace, out of any of them.

  Muslims, like the Japanese before them, simply don’t know how to surrender–until they’re told to by their own leaders.

• 19 sinz54 // Dec 28, 2009 at 9:55 am

  aDude:
  

  I would remind everyone of the kamikaze ethic of Imperial Japan during World War II. The one similarity, of course, is a religious belief that there will be reward in the afterlife for giving one’s life for the greater cause.

  The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka have used suicide bombing (as well as other terrorist tactics) in their fight to secede from Sri Lanka.

  The major Tamil religion is Shaivite Hinduism, but the Tigers don’t see themselves as warriors for God, but for their land. Does anybody here know if they’re so religiously devout that they too believe they will go to Heaven after they blow themselves up?

• 20 teabag // Dec 28, 2009 at 11:17 am

  Nate Silver puts this in context.

  <blockquoteOver the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas…
  Over the past decade, according to BTS [the Bureau of Transportation Statistics], there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

  These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune…

  There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

• 21 teabag // Dec 28, 2009 at 11:18 am

  Oh for an edit function!

• 22 teabag // Dec 28, 2009 at 11:24 am

  Politico.

  Republicans have cast votes against the key TSA funding measure, the 2010 appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security contained, which included funding for the TSA, including for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures. In the June 24 vote in the House, leading Republicans including John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan voted against the bill, amid a procedural dispute over the appropriations process, a Democrat points out. A full 108 Republicans voted against the conference version, including Boehner, Boehner, Hoekstra, Pence, Michelle Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Darrell Issa, and Joe Wilson.

  The conference bill included more than $4 billion for “screening operations,” including $1.1 billion in funding for explosives detection systems, including $778 million for buying and installing the systems.

• 23 Rod // Dec 28, 2009 at 2:56 pm

  The naivety of youth and or religion breeds terrorism.

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