The Roots of Terrorism

My friend CIP, likes to think that it is lack of jobs and hope and so on that is the root cause of terrorism. It is however only one of the possible causes, and that operates only sometimes.

The Ali al-Tamimi quoted in the post below this one, has the following bio. from Wikipedia - some deprivation he suffered!

Al-Tamimi was born in Washington, DC, and raised in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood. His father, a lawyer, worked at the Iraqi embassy, and his mother was a noted scholar of psychology. When he was 15 his family moved to Saudi Arabia, where he became interested in Islam. On returning to the U.S. two years later, he attended The George Washington University and the University of Maryland, College Park. He received a doctorate in computational biology from George Mason University on the topic of "Chaos and Complexity in Cancer". In the early 1990's, Al-Tamimi led a five person delegation from the Islamic Assembly of North America in the United Nations 4th World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China. Al-Tamimi contacted Shaikh Abdel Rahaman Abdel Khaliq, who wrote a book about women in Islam, which Al-Tamimi translated into English.

He lectured often at the Center for Islamic Information and Education in Falls Church, Virginia. He was a founding member of the Center, which is also known as Dar al-Arqam.

Prior to al-Tammi's prosecution, 11 members of the Virginia Jihad Network were charged with a number of charges related to their participation in a terrorist enterprise. Although the group trained with paintguns they also were convicted of using and possessing various firearms, rocket propelled grenades and explosives. Nine members of the group were found guilty.

Dr. al-Timimi remained under Grand Jury investigation as an unindicted co-conspirator during the trial of the Network members. After the conclusion of the Virginia Jihad Network trials, prosecutors then successfully proved that al-Timimi was the spiritual leader of the group and had encouraged them to wage Jihad on India and the US.

What CIP does not realize is that, e.g., US Christian fundamentalists do not typically come from deprived backgrounds. Nor do these jihadis. Not al-Tamimi, nor the Virginia 11. Unlike the Christian fundamentalists, these guys' fundamentalism teaches them to be violent.

The whole fear of bringing religion into politics, or slandering a religion of peace, or some obscure liberal inability to comprehend that there can be entire groups of people who are not nice, mysteriously keeps this from the comprehension. It is an illusion that everyone wants peace. These blinders are strange, because it is not at all difficult to acknowledge that there are totally undeprived, unpoor, unoppressed people who become religious fundamentalists. There are plenty in America. It is just an additional step to understand that some fundamentalisms involves a lethal embrace of holy war.

PS: It is even more mysterious, this inability to see, when e.g, CIP himself would acknowledge that an entire American elite, the neo-cons, commandeered the apparatus of the state to wage their war of choice. So at least grant that this can happen with other elites, too.