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The Making of a Modern Day Terrorist

Are Poverty and Poor Education Really the Cause?

by Mark DeYoung

On Christmas Day, the world was shocked to discover that a young Nigerian man almost succeeded in blowing up an airliner over U.S. soil, in what would have been the first successful terrorist attack since 9/11. It was also disturbing to learn that the 23-year-old would-be bomber was the son of a wealthy banker (and former economics minister) and had studied mechanical engineering at the prestigious University College London while staying in a $3 million apartment.

For decades, and especially since 9/11, world leaders, governments and international institutions have sought to understand the root causes of terrorism. Many blamed poverty. Provide restless unemployed, under-educated young men with economic and educational opportunities and terrorism would dry up at its source. From World Bank presidents to U.N. agencies to Nobel Prize winners, along with numerous political leaders on the left and right, the idea that economic and educational depravity fuel terrorist activity has persisted.

It’s a commonsensical and convenient way to get our arms around a horrific phenomenon. But is it true? With this latest incident and others like it, policy makers need to revisit and analyze that important question: What makes a terrorist?

A Fortune magazine report printed in 2007 looked at the fifty poorest countries of the world. Only one had seen much domestic and/or international terrorism, and only two others had a limited connection with any terrorism at all.

When Princeton economist Alan Krueger looked at a broad cross section of terrorists from different countries he concluded that "as a group, terrorists are better educated and from wealthier families than the typical person in the same age group in the societies from which they originate." The 148 Palestinian suicide bombers he analyzed were less likely to come from impoverished households and had post-high school education at much higher levels (60% compared to 15% in the general population). Biographies of the Hezbollah martyrs (for which information is available) reveal they came from poor families at a much smaller rate than the general Lebanese population. His work also revealed that when economic conditions worsened in the Middle East, terrorism did not increase.

Krueger also analyzed all the 781 incidents that the US State Department considers “significant” terrorist events. It revealed that terrorists do not tend to come from countries where there is poverty and inequality, but where there is political oppression.

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, writing in the New York Times, drew similar conclusions on the education question. He examined the backgrounds of 75 terrorists involved in some of the most recent attacks (the WTC in 1993, the American embassy bombings, 9/11 and Bali in 2002) against Western nations. He found that 53 percent received college degrees or had attended college (which is a greater rate than the American population).

“In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but ... when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism ... but ... also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin.” This was the strong conclusion from a prominent researcher/professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Alberto Abadie, after analyzing recent data on international and domestic acts of terrorism.

What do most of these researchers suggest as an alternative to the poverty/education and terrorism link? They cite terrorist acts as politically motivated, a reaction against what the terrorists deem political oppression and lower levels of political rights.

More controversially, some researchers suggest that foreign occupation is the real motivator for terrorists. Robert Pape, researcher at the University of Chicago, studied all the suicide bombings that took place from 1980 to 2003. He concluded that nearly all suicide attacks have a specific goal in common “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.” He even cited the fact that there was not one documented suicide attack in Iraq until after the American presence.

On a side note, while many researchers acknowledge that religious fanaticism and Islamic extremism often play a role in recruitment, they do not consider them to be the underlying cause for most terrorist activity over the last three decades. At the same time, religious fanaticism as a motivator for terrorist activity seems to be a growing phenomenon.

In a time of increasing global political unrest and terrorist activity, it is time for our leaders to look more closely at the real root causes of terrorism. While this issue is certainly complex and multi-layered, it seems clear that the poverty, education and terrorism link is extremely superficial.  The old Marxist thesis that poverty cultivates criminals needs to die. Not only is it offensive to our poor neighbors around the world, but making it a part of our national security efforts is ineffective and leaves us exposed to new threats.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)