MICHELLE MALKIN
January 17, 2014
The myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist never dies. U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry is the latest Obama administration
official to peddle this odious narrative. Cue John Lennon's cloying
"Imagine," don your plaid pajamas, and curl up with a warm cup of deadly
naivete.
While meeting with Catholic Church officials at the Vatican in Rome
on Monday, Kerry expounded on their "huge common interest in dealing
with this issue of poverty, which in many cases is the root cause of
terrorism or even the root cause of the disenfranchisement of millions
of people on this planet." In other words: If only every al-Qaida and
Taliban recruit had a fraction of Kerry's $200 million fortune, they'd
all be frolicking peacefully with infidels on jet skis sporting
"Coexist" bumper stickers.
This wasn't a one-off. Kerry delivered a similar Kumbaya-style
discourse at the Global Counterterrorism Forum last fall: "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." Naturally, the Foggy Bottom apple doesn't fall far from
the Pennsylvania Avenue terror-excusing tree.
President Obama subscribes
to the very same "midnight basketball" theory of counterterrorism. In
the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Obama asserted that jihad "grows out of
a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."
The chronic cluelessness of the root-cause apologists of jihad never
ceases to amaze. Britain's MI5 reported in 2011 that two-thirds of the
U.K's jihad suspects were from middle-class backgrounds, "showing there
is no simplistic relationship between poverty and involvement in
Islamist extremism." Thorough reviews of the empirical evidence shows,
as the RAND Corporation reported, that "(t)errorists 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."
Here's a refresher cheat sheet:
--9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta went to Hamburg University to study urban planning.
--Convicted al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani who
studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at
Brandeis.
--Osama bin Laden did a summer school stint at Oxford.
--Christmas Day underwear bomb operative Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab
was an elite Nigerian engineering student who studied at one of
Britain's leading universities and "lived a gilded life."
--Jihadist Samantha Lewthwaite, the notorious "White Widow" British
Muslim convert linked to last year's Westgate mall massacre in Nairobi,
was the daughter of a soldier and a former University of London student.
--British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a London School of Economics
student, was convicted of abducting and murdering American journalist
Daniel Pearl.
--Seven upper-middle-class jihadi doctors were implicated in the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings.
--Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri didn't need more education or
wealth to steer him away from Islamic imperialism. He had a medical
degree. So did former Hamas biggie Abdel al-Rantissi.
--Al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed attended Chowan College
in Murfreesboro, N.C., and then transferred to North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical State University, where he earned his degree
in mechanical engineering along with 30 other Muslims. Mohammed applied
his Western learning to oversee the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot
(six Americans dead), the U.S.S. Cole attack (17 American soldiers
dead) and the September 11 attacks (3,000 dead). He also has been linked
to the 1998 African embassy bombings (212 dead, including 12
Americans), the plot to kill the pope, the murder of American journalist
Daniel Pearl and the Bali nightclub bomb blast that killed nearly 200
tourists, including two more Americans.
Osama bin Laden, of course, was dedicated to spending every last
penny of his inherited Saudi fortune -- estimated at between $50 million
and $300 million -- to wage war on the West. Al-Shabaab jihadists have
amassed their own terror campaign chest through the illegal ivory trade.
Privileged jihad funders from Qatar and other Gulf states heap their
petro-dollars on al-Qaida. The Taliban raised $400 million in one year,
according to a 2012 U.N. report, not just from opium, but largely from
"donations, taxing local economies and extorting money from such targets
as drug dealers, cellphone operators and aid projects." Indeed, since
2006, "the Taliban have managed to finance an ever-increasing number of
attacks, reflecting a year-on-year increase in income," the U.N. report
said.
Memo to stupidly rich elitist John Kerry, richly stupid progressive
Barack Obama and the administration's bleeding-heart bureaucrats in a
bubble: Financial bankruptcy is not, and has never been, the "root
cause" of Koran-inspired hatred and violence against nonbelievers. Lack
of intellectual stimulation is not, and has never been, the "root cause"
of radical Islam's centuries-old and never-ceasing imperative to
establish a worldwide caliphate and conquer the West. The root cause of
civilizational jihad is unmitigated evil and arrogance, not lack of
compassion, understanding or social justice.
Islamic terrorism never had such dutiful tools as the American fools who rationalize it.
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