This is what I think about the “war on terror.”

Oh, and delusional wankers who believe any of that tripe to begin with get some blame too.

See! It is really very easy.

It’s all academic chatter…..wealthy breeds “decadence, corruption, and tyranny” and poverty breeds terrorists and criminals.

The thing I hate about how they talk about the subject is that it tends to destroy the idea of free-will.

They excuse the acts of a small percentage of people raised in poverty by saying “you can’t really blame them.”

An odd thing, however, is that the same basic premise (that socio-economic factors create a deterministic social life pattern) does NOT lead these guys to excuse the actions of the rich and powerful…..

Interesting….

Anyway…..a saying by Judge Judy has stuck in my mind in relation to this point

How much choice does anybody have? How much is conditioned? Why do I have my opinions?

I tend to read things that reinforce my own point of view. Anybody who claims otherwise is fooling himself.

Everybody is biased and stupid. Poor people are bad and rich people are bad. Happy now?

Some dirt poor people can be recruited as terrorists, but I think you’re right insomuch as the leaders and agitators in terror movements are almost always middle- or upper-middle class, not poor. They will enlist the poor to do their dirty work, but creating a terrorist fantasy ideology (whether it is advocated by Al-Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers, the Basque ETA, or the Ku Klux Klan) involves an opportunity cost that the poor cannot pay.

This is true. Equally so, just because Kim DJ says that terrorism is caused by poverty doesn’t make it so either. We need to make a stronger case for it than that if it is to be proven correct.

Granted, some terrorist groups might be formed by the shared experience of living in poverty, or might be motivated by the desire to equalize the distribution of wealth, but does that prove that poverty lies at the heart of all terrorism?

Again, as I said in my post, why don’t we listen to the terrorists themselves and let them tell us what motivates them? Might they have a better understanding of why they do what they do than we?
See this article at Wikipedia for a bit of a primer about terrorism. I am by no means an expert, but from what little reading I have done terrorism is more about things like unequal power distribution, feelings of desparation and hopelessness (which can - but by no means must - be related to things like economic inequality), and ideology.

One thing we must recognise is that most dirt poor people in the world do not engage in terrorism. Why is this?

http://www.npr.org/programs/mo.....joyce.html

The highlights:

“Mr. SCOTT ATRAN (Anthropologist): There’s this knee-jerk reaction that people who do this have to be maniacs or cowards, uneducated or miserable or in despair, and none of this seems to be true at all…

“Mr. ATRAN: These people are fairly well educated, mostly from middle class and not acting at all in despair.

“JOYCE: Atran summarizes these findings in today’s issue of the journal Science. He notes that the government of Singapore recently published a similar report on Asian terrorists linked to al-Qaeda that found the same trend…

“Mr. ALAN KRUEGER (Princeton University): I think there’s very little connection between economic circumstances and support for terrorism or maybe even an opposite relationship, from what most people suspect.

“JOYCE: As for the bombers themselves, Krueger says terrorist literature indicates they are more likely to come from the ranks of middle-class college students…”

There are dozens of other articles that say exactly the same thing if you type “suicide bomber profile” into Google.