Note: This is the
leadership responsible for providing the foreign policy thinking and
application of its decisions. This thinking went the way of cassette tapes-it
has been discredited and determined to be totally inaccurate; yet, America's
leadership clings to it-one must ask why? Exerpt: In reality, study
after study has shown that jihadists are not poor and
bereft of economic opportunities, but generally wealthier and better educated
than their peers...Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are
not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease.
Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy. Read
entire article and ask why? Doc
Last Friday in
New York, at a meeting of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), Secretary
of State John Kerry and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu launched what
they called the “Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience,” which CNSNews.com said was intended to “support
local communities and organizations to counter extremist ideology and promote
tolerance.” It will do this essentially by giving potential jihad terrorists
money and jobs – an initiative that proceeds from the false and oft-disproven
assumption that poverty causes terrorism.
Kerry
demonstrated his faith in this false assumption when he spoke about the
importance of “providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at
risk of recruitment” into jihad groups. The GCTF is devoting $200 million to
this project, which it calls “countering violent extremism” (CVE).
Kerry said
this money would be used for “challenging the narrative of violence that is
used to justify the slaughtering of innocent people.” But it doesn’t seem as if
any significant amount of time or money will be devoted to any effort to
convince young would-be jihadis that the al-Qaeda understanding of Islam is
wrong, and that Islam is actually a Religion of Peace.
Rather, the
GFCER of the CVE program of the GCTF bears more than just a passing resemblance
to the WPA and the TVA and the rest of FDR’s alphabet soup of Depression-era
recovery agencies. It is little more than a large-scale jobs program, as Kerry
explained: “Getting this right isn’t just about taking terrorists off the
street. It’s about providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth
at risk of recruitment. In country after country, you look at the demographics
– Egypt, the West Bank – 60 percent of the young people either under the age of
30 or under the age of 25, 50 percent under the age of 21, 40 percent under the
age of 18, all of them wanting jobs, opportunity, education, and a future.”
This will be
$200 million down the drain, for a lack of “economic opportunities for
marginalized youth” doesn’t fuel Islamic jihad terrorism in the first place. Is
it poverty and a lack of economic opportunities that leads the fantastically
rich House of Saud to finance that jihad worldwide? If Kerry were correct and
terrorism is simply a byproduct of poverty, why isn’t Haiti a terrorist state?
Why isn’t the world plagued with Bolivian suicide bombers?
In reality, study
after study has shown that jihadists are not poor and
bereft of economic opportunities, but generally wealthier and better educated
than their peers. CNS noted that “according to a Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the
Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly
impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically,
their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment).
Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged
backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found
that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more
rather than less educated than the general population.’”
But none of
this has sunk in among the political elites. According to CNS, Illinois State
Senator Barack Obama talked in October 2001 about “some of the root causes of
this terrorist activity,” noting that “for nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Indonesia, or much of the Middle East, young men have no opportunities. They see
poverty all around them and they are angry by that poverty.”
In reality, as
the Times Online reported as far back as April
2005, “three-quarters of the Al-Qaeda members were from upper middle-class
homes and many were married with children; 60% were college educated, often in
Europe or the United States.”
There are
innumerable examples of affluent Muslims becoming jihad terrorists. One was
Maher “Mike” Hawash of Portland, Oregon, a well-regarded Intel executive who
made $360,000 a year at the crest of a highly successful career. Around the
year 2000 Hawash began to become more religious, growing his beard long,
rejecting the nickname “Mike,” and attending the supremacist Islamic Center of
Portland. Ultimately he served a seven-year prison term for conspiring to aid
the Taliban.
More recently,
there was Sabirhan Hasanoff, a graduate of Baruch College who was a senior
manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then CFO of a large company in Dubai.
Hasanoff was sentenced last Monday to eighteen years in prison for aiding
al-Qaeda. Contrite at his sentencing, Hasanoff didn’t say anything about
lacking economic opportunities – on the contrary, he said: “I made a good living and my family and
I enjoyed a very comfortable lifestyle. And then, for reasons that I still have
trouble confronting, I threw that all away.”
Those reasons
that he had trouble confronting, according to AP, were rooted in Islam: “Inspired
by radical clerics, he said his desire to strengthen his Muslim
faith and fight atrocities committed against Muslims around the world
mixed with guilt about his comfortable life.”
That would
suggest that this new initiative of the Global Fund for Community Engagement
and Resilience is not only doomed to fail, as it obviously is, but that it
could be actively counter-productive: what if one (or more) of the potential
jihadis who find gainful employ thanks to John Kerry and Ahmet Davutoglu start
to feel guilty about their “comfortable lifestyle,” and turn to jihad in order
to compensate for it, as did Sabirhan Hasanoff?
One thing is
certain: John Kerry and Ahmet Davutoglu will never consider that question, and
no member of the mainstream media will ever ask them to. Another certainty is
that jihad terrorism will continue despite this new financial windfall for
young Muslim men, and given the way these throw-money-at-the-problem solutions
have worked in the past (cf. the billions we gave the Pakistanis to fight
al-Qaeda, that instead ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda), it is likely that
some or most of this money will end up financing that jihad terror. One wonders
how long this madness can go on without anyone in the loyal opposition in
Washington ever getting the clue that it is time for some accountability.
No comments:
Post a Comment