This Friday 13th, "9/11 liberal" Jeff Jarvis takes a very large axe to the notion that terrorism is caused by economic deprivation and lack of education. Of course, he has a bit of inside help from a study done by professors Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Malecková. Summary: not only is this notion foolish and immoral, it's factually wrong. I'll leave him with the final word, but you'll want to read his whole post.
"So all this blather about the poor, downtrodden terrorists, all the crap-think asking "why do they hate us?" is irrelevant. It's worse than irrelevant: It's offensive; it's enabling; it's making excuses for evil deeds and the devils who do them."
Acts of violence may not be done because of poverty but those in poverty are more likely to
go along. Example - Germany. There is no excuse
but show me a civilization without this kind of
immorality and I'll go there.
CB
Who's been blathering about poor, downtrodden terrorists?
Answer to both posts... read Jarvis' article.
Joe -
I've actually had to work hard this week, so had little time to blog, but had to add something to this.
To solve this problem, I've always argued that you need to do three things simultaneously:
1) defend against terrorist acts;
2) defeat the terrorists by destroying their infrastructre and denying them the financial and logistical support they need;
3) stop growing them.
The reasons they grow are complicated...certainly they have little directly to do with poverty (but much indirectly to do with it), and much to do with softer issues like legitimacy and alienation.
One of the problems is that many of the things you can do to improve 1) and 2), in the long run make 3) worse (and vice versa).
I think the Palestinians and Islamists use each other, but I'd be very careful about assuming that we're dealing with the same problem in either case, or that the solutions are the same in either case.
A.L.
This is a silly, splenetic comment (starting with the title: "There is no reason for terrorism") on an article that makes a good point: terrorism might have a lot more to do with oppressive government than with poverty per se.
So where do those oppressive governments come from? How are they maintained?
Before I get into this:
There is a difference between a moral defense (an excuse), and an explanation that could lead to solutions. For example, Israeli defense strategists have articulated for a long time the value that Israel has for despotic Middle East governments -- it is easy to make Israel an external focus for their subjects' hatred, and it saves those governments from becoming the focus themselves. Israeli defense intellectuals don't rant about how terrorism is unreasoning (at least not in their private conversations). They know better. The individual suicide bomber may be deracinated, but not the organization delivering the human bomb.
Getting back to the point about despotism:
Unfortunately, it's been pointed out that a certain kind of national wealth -- primary resources such as, yes, petroleum -- will predispose a new nation toward despotism. Sure, if you're Norway, with a long history of democracy and liberty, you've built up the political antibodies: North Sea oil won't corrupt you. If you're Iraq, or Kuwait, however, forget it: he who has the gold makes the rules, and when you have foreigners with the resource extraction technology coming into somewhat anarchic political situations seeking deals, the tribal chieftain who makes the most arms-enforceable extraction deal makes the rules for the rest of that society, until the resource runs out.
So whether a Saudi Arabia or an Iran is rich or poor in per capita terms because of its resource wealth is less important than the fact that there are huge economic blocs -- Western Europe, the U.S., Japan and the Asian Tiger economies -- whose industrial systems are critically dependent on oil, not on palm dates or pistachio nuts, the traditional exports of these regions.
Let's look at where all this can be seen in one piece: Israel and its relations with the Palestinians and its neighbors. During intifada/suicide-bombing fugues, Israel perhaps goes through the rough equivalent (in per capita terms) of a 9/11, cumulatively, every few months or so. A major reason is now pretty easy to see: the United States needs this oil, that oil props up those regional despotisms, those despotisms need to focus their subjects' rage away from themselves, the Palestinians make a good spearpoint symbol for this purpose, and that symbolic spearpoint has a convenient target that will take it (up to a point): Israel's founding ethnicity is one that is historically inured to being a scapegoat race under the protection of a bigger power.
I'm all for rejecting simplistic explanations. However, this particular submission seems to reject explanations, period. Even with a pretty good explanation being cited directly. My God ... it's just ... just ... inexcusable irrationality ;-)
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
tokyo
Michael:
One point to add- the oil selling nations may need us to buy their oil as much as we need them to sell it to us. Several years down the road, Russia (and other non-OPEC countries) may become far larger petroleum exporters than OPEC.