The myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist never dies. Secretary of State John Kerry is the latest Obama 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 naïveté.
While meeting with Catholic officials at the Vatican 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 Qaeda 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.
He gave 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.”
The chronic cluelessness of the root-cause apologists of jihad never ceases to amaze. Britain’s MI5 reported in 2011 that two-thirds of UK 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 Corp. reported, “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.”
Here’s a refresher cheat sheet:
• 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta went to Hamburg University to study urban planning.
• Convicted al Qaeda 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.
• 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.”
• British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheik, 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 Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri had a medical degree. So did former Hamas biggie Abdel al-Rantissi.
• Khalid Sheik 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, the USS Cole attack and the 9/11 attacks. He also has been linked to the 1998 African embassy bombings, the plot to kill the pope, the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl and the Bali nightclub bomb blast that killed nearly 200 tourists.
Bin Laden was dedicated to spending every last penny of his inherited Saudi fortune — estimated at $50 million to $300 million — to wage war on the West.
Privileged jihad funders from Qatar and other Gulf states heap their petro-dollars on al Qaeda. The Taliban raised $400 million in one year, according to a 2012 UN 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 UN report said.
Memo to stupidly rich elitist John Kerry and the administration’s bleeding-heart bureaucrats in a bubble: Financial bankruptcy is not, and has never been, the “root cause” of this violence. Lack of intellectual stimulation 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.