Poverty causes terrorism
On Monday the Times of London, citing analysts, reported: "'Orchard of fighters' grows out of poverty and mistrust in Yemen."
Last week, President Obama said of the Christmas bomber, "We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies."
Yemen's crushing poverty? Abdul Mutallab isn't even Yemeni; he is Nigerian, and an affluent one, at that. Apparently, the president is suggesting that poor, unsuspecting Abdul Mutallab wound up in Yemen and was radicalized by Muslims there who were themselves radicalized by Yemen's "crushing poverty." Why mention it if that is not the general theory he is putting forth?
Yet there is a little problem with that theory. According to the World Bank, Zimbabwe is 11 times poorer than Yemen. Yet no Zimbabwean national has been caught trying to blow up U.S. airliners. There's a simple reason for that. Less than 1 percent of the population of Zimbabwe is Muslim.
Consider this list of known al-Qaeda terrorists, and find what links all of them:
• Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed was a mechanical engineer
• Mohammed Atta grew up in a middle class household; his father was an attorney.
• Ramzi Binalshibh was a bank clerk.
• Mohammed Atef was an Egyptian police officer.
• Ziad Jarrah came from a wealthy Lebanese family and attended private, Christian schools.
• Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker," had an MA in international business studies.
• Major Malik Nadal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was a psychiatrist.
• Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the underwear bomber, was the son of a bank chairman.
• Hammam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, who killed eight CIA agents in Afghanistan last month, was a physician.
When looking for one factor that unites all al Qaeda operatives, it is clearly not poverty. Al Qaeda's terrorists cannot be connected based on their family or personal income. The one commonality they all share is an adherence to radical Islam.
They all share an adherence to radical Islam. Osama bin Laden himself is a phenomenally wealthy Saudi. If poverty is the driving force behind terrorism, what drives him?
Better a hundred terrorists go free...
There's a phrase repeated over and over by civil libertarian and ACLU types and often attributed to either Justice William O. Douglas or Justice Louis Brandeis:
"Better 100 guilty parties go free than one innocent person be convicted."
I once wrote a book on crime and after hearing this phrase for about the 20th time, I came to one conclusion: Whoever said it wasn't planning on living in the same neighborhood with those ... 100 guilty criminals.
There's too much detail to excerpt here. Suffice it to say that William Tucker lays out the case that our justice system has been making it more and more difficult for law enforcement to do their jobs for decades. The end result of such policies is the asinine notion of granting full rights to terrorists guilty of massacring thousands of citizens:
Constitutional Rights for a man who has never lived in this country and whose only connection is that he orchestrated an attack that killed 3,000 people? It may sound strange, but that's exactly what we're letting ourselves in for. As a criminal defendant, KSM will have every much a right as the Blackwater guards and O.J. Simpson and Claus Von Bulow to challenge the system. And he won't need ACLU lawyers to do it for him. It is more than likely that Muslim defense funds -- fed by Arab oil money -- will hire the best attorneys (or train them themselves) to work the system to the nth degree. Same goes for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who just won his Constitutional Rights by climbing on an airplane with a bomb in his underpants. Could we make attacking this country any more attractive?
And here we have the danger of liberal thinking:
It is staggering to try to grasp the naïveté of the Obama Administration in leading us down this path. The only thing that makes it comprehensible is their staggering naïveté in going to Copenhagen for the Climate Conference. Obama and the gang -- let's face it -- live on the myth that they are poor little college graduates armed only with their law degrees, taking on the big bad businesses that are worth millions and billions and zillions of dollars. All they have to do is make a convincing case to the general public and they can start redistributing all that wealth.
What never occurs to them is that, in the eyes of most of the world, they're the undeserving rich. Obama went to Copenhagen and found himself facing representatives of millions and billions of people saying, "Give us money, too." And of course Obama & Co. all too ready to cough up some loose change out of America's pockets -- although the taxpayers are not likely to agree with them.
Now Obama and his administration are going to get a lesson in what it means to try to extend the niceties of the American criminal justice system to a world full of potential terrorists.
It's not going to be pretty.
No, it's not. It's going to be fatal, but only to anonymous American citizens like you and I. Thus, outside the political ramifications of such attacks...they don't care.
There's my two cents.
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