Terrorism, Crime: How Does Poverty Factor In?

I think that what Alex Epstein wrote was right on target...........but he only described part of the answer. At the heads of these terrorist organizations are people of great wealth. This wealth could be used to better the lives of their neighbors. Instead, because of the hatred of the ideals of America, they choose to use that wealth to attempt to destroy America.

On the other hand, you have the common people, dirt poor, and eager to give their lives for something better than what they have now. Taught to hate the West, the wealthy leaders use these poor young people as human bombs...........selling them a bill of goods about a better "afterlife".

So the issue of poverty as a root cause of terrorism is only one part of the total issue. The central issue is the training of youngsters to despise the West, and work for its downfall!

Poor people are just a cannon-fodder of terror. The leaders of the terrorist organizations are usually wealthy people with excellent education. Just look through biographies of Carlos, Usama bin-Laden, Hajji Amin el-Husseini, George Habash, Dr. Abed el-Aziz Rantissi, Arafat, and the like.

One more thing, if poverty is an excuse for murder, why then are not being exonerated criminal murderers that originate in the lower classes? There are other ways of reaching wealth: working hard and trying to improve educational level.

Well, maybe not poverty of itself, then. Consider poverty to be an overcrowded mud hut and one small bowl of rice (or whatever). Now, add the fear that tomorrow the rice may be withheld and the hut bulldozed. Poverty accompanied by fear may be a whole different situation.

Send the mudhut dwellers to indoctrinal schools that focus hate like a laser on outside targets--and we may have the recipe.

Which may well be the only schools available, and the only opportunity to excel at something.

Poverty is not IMO the cause of terrorism religion is. I would add that a religion that promotes terror, glorifies suicide and the killing of innocents in the name of their God is nothing less than evil.

Suppose you are doing a bad job of running your country and your people are unhappy. You want to stay in power and don't want to have to fight your own people to stay there.

Why not just explain to them that everything that is wrong is because of the great Satan! Focus all that discontent and rage that would otherwise be the underpinnings of revolution against someone else! What a great idea!

It's such a great idea that it has caught on in most of the Arab world.

By the way, in '70s there were enough European terrorists, like Baader-Meinhoff group, Brigate Rossi and the like. And their participants were mainly the bored educated young people from the middle-class families. Of course, it is easier to recruit cannon-fodder for the terror activities in the underprivileged neigborhoods, but the real generators of terror are far from being needy.
By the way, when the Hamas recruiters started their attempts to convince a son of one of their own leaders, Dr. Abed el-Aziz Rantissi, to commit a homicide bombing, they were told to back off. Later the boy was sent to Saudi college to exclude any contact with his dad's gangsters... It seems to me that the terror leaders do not believe much in a fairy tale about 70 virgins that serve each righteous Muslim in the paradise...

It is interesting that everyone that was identified as being "someone" in Al Queda was a person of means. The only "poor" in the group were the foot soldiers that have been swept up by the group as they moved along.

I don't buy the poverty angle by itself. There are very few poor in Saudi Arabia. The government provides every citizen with a whole lot more than we get here in the US. (They have universial health care, free schools, they are given cars and the government provides a dowry upon marriage..).

The only common thread I've noticed amongst the various terrorist groups over the years is that they tend to hold an extremist views (political and/or religious) and feel that "government" isn't responsive to their pleas. Unlike other groups though, they are unwilling to argue their views long term and instead turn to violent means to advance their goals.

Across Europe the terrorist groups of the late 1960s and into the 1970s had an idealogy very similar and to the European Green parties. Why did one group turn to violent insurrection while the other became an established and respcted political party? There was little, if any, difference in the economic status of the members of both camps.

Well, even in Europe not every wealthy person is a gentleman or a lady. Ability to undertake civilized efforts in order to achieve the goal are features of real gentlemen/ladies, ragtag wants everything right now unconditionally.

In a NYT editorial last week Thomas Friedman does an interesting rephrase of the thing Roger and Sophia were working out in this thread: poverty does not itself make terrorists, but it creates the socio-economic umfeld in which terrorism prospers.

Even fishin's first point - "The only "poor" in the group were the foot soldiers that have been swept up by the group" - can fit in the same line of thought. Hateful ideologies (and hateful personal ambitions) make extremist leaders with terrorist desires - poverty doesnt even figure in when it comes to their background or their priorities. But they will remain 'voices in the desert' (as we aptly say here) if they fail to tap into some bigger socio-economic undercurrent that will yield them the footsoldiers they need for the wars they want to fight.

Same went for the original Bolsheviks, for example: the leaders were themselves usually of bourgeois or aristocratic background, but they remained a sect until they managed to tap into the rage and exasperation of a sizable chunk of poor city folk in the summer of 1917, and that allowed them to stage their coup d'etat called the "Russian Revolution".

With terrorism it all depends, of course. To prepare an attack on the US, you need "volunteers" who can, say, take flying classes in America without raising suspicions - preferably no illiterate Pakistani proletarians, thus. But the perpetrators of the Casablanca bomb attack this summer were all natives of the souk, of dirt-poor background.

Yet - and this is my opinion - it is not poverty itself that fuels the umfeld in which fanaticism can prosper; a stable level of poverty, however extreme, will merely foster resignation and apathy. It's the spectre of change that really gets societies to the brink.

People will mobilise - and ultimately revolt - when things suddenly threaten to get (much) worse ... or when a real opportunity for things to get better appears and people see the chance passing them by. The Slovenes and Croats, for example, revolted around 1990 because they felt they were so close to the EU door, and the Serbs were dragging them right down away from it again.

Terrorist footsoldiers, likewise, are often driven on by a sense of frustration about the opportunities they have come to be able to see - but not reach. Reading Kaplan's "The Ends of the Earth" brought that point home, too, the chapter on Egypt for example. The fundamentalists' footsoldiers have had the education their parents never had - they live in the city and no longer in some decrepit village - but they're still dirt-poor and mostly unemployed.

Anywho - back to Friedman, and particularly the first of the quoted paragraphs below (the point of which the remaining paragraphs merely illustrate in a more colorful, but roundabout way):



Friedman additionally links this analysis up with "Cancun" (the failed WTO summit last month). He appeals to the US and EU to listen to what the developing countries were saying there and do away with their free trade-busting tariffs and subsidies, because (he quotes Robert Wright):



Connect the dots: terrorism, Cancun
(I've linked in the Houston Chronicle version cause the NYT makes you pay for archive material).

Terrorism and crime (terrorism is really just an extreme crime) are choices people make based on a simple economic model. It has nothing directly to do with poverty. Terrorism in fact seems often to be a crime perpetrated by men of means.

I suspect that crime and poverty are linked but not causally. People choose crime as a way to meet their desires and needs when they perceive the opportunity cost of crime to be lower than legal methods they could take to achieve the same goals. Now, this is just my personal opinion (so feel free to rip it to shreds), but I think that the kind of thinking that tends to choose crime tends to result in other choices that increase the likelihood of becoming impoverished. This is what I mean when I write that crime and poverty are linked, but not causally.

I don't believe that being impoverished leads to crime, but I suspect that the flawed thinking that often leads one to choose crime also leads one to become impoverished. Being born into poverty isn't a cause of crime. Many people born into poverty do not remain in poverty. Those who do are likely making choices that perpetuate their state, and I suspect these are more likely to choose crime than those who move out of poverty, not because of their impoverished state, but because of the choices they make which keep them there.

Most all of us here have said it - terrorist and extremist leaders and ideologues are often men of means. But they need footsoldiers to fight for them, blow themselves up for them. The Casablanca bombing may have been directed by Osama's Al-Qaeda - but the men who carried the bombs were from the local slums. The footsoldiers are often people who do live in a poverty that, as Sofia put it so nicely. "leeches hope and possibility for future happiness out of their lives".

Or, as Howard Dean put it yesterday,



You need a strategy to hit out at those "merchants of death", often quite wealthy people - and you need a strategy to drain the reservoir of people desperate enough to see joining their "troops" as the only way to achieve a better life, if not here than in the afterlife. That means fighting poverty - or more precisely, fighting desperation.

Desperation is a powerful force that doesn't hinge just on poverty without prospects - that just breeds resignation - but on the combination of poverty and fear, as Roger pointed out. On the combination of poverty and the spectre of change, as I suggested: the sense that even that which they have is acutely threatened, or the frustration at opportunities they have come to see - but are barred from reaching.

At the moment, in the ME, its just the extremists who are capitalising on this desperation. You need a strategy to tackle the situation where the extremists are the only ones offering schools and social help to those who would otherwise be without - and who thus accept in gratitude what are basically instruments of indoctrination. There are so many people there who've come to want serious schools, like they've come to want serious politics, but who are faced with indifferent, corrupt, (semi-)dictatorial state bureaucracies - and only the fundamentalists have the network in place to jump in the gap and cater to their needs and desires.

To counter the fundamentalists, you need to offer more than a fight - you need to offer an alternative.

In a way the neo-cons are therefore to be praised for steering at something far beyond the mere pacification/stablisation of establishing a "friendly regime" in Iraq - to aspire to remake the country, so to say. Its just that the target they chose was highly odd: in a region awash with fundamentalist agitation, Saddam's Iraq was not among the places where the terrorists came from. Liberating it was an exhilerating blow against totalitarianism - but didn't do much for fighting Islamist extremism. Iraq is quickly becoming a practical base for extremists now, though - a degree of anarchism being the natural cost of dissolving totalitarianism - and to stem the risks that are emerging as a result, the US is now forced to pour billions into the country. Meanwhile, the extremists' political drive elsewhere - the drive that did spur 9/11 - is continuing if not accelerating.

Basically, it should have been (and still is) a question of putting one's money where one's mouth is.

One - fighting terrorism means hitting at the terrorists - focus on Al-Qaeda, dont let yourself be diverted into other tempting ME causes. "Osama" should have remained the prime target from day one.

Two - draining the extremists' reservoirs of support (and keep them from filling back up) means providing an alternative to what the fundamentalists are offering. If you cant, obviously, go in there yourself (because you'd be seen as imposing your imperialist will) - and the governments of the region can't be trusted, find other ways. Be like Soros in Eastern Europe: find the local actors that do aim to offer a modernist alternative - and swamp the region with support and funding for good schools, independent media, community initiatives. Bypass the corrupt governments and boost a civil society that simultaneously provides an alternative to the fundamentalist networks and pressures those governments to reform. And I mean a lot of money - almost as much as fully-fledged war costs. See it as a bottom-up Marshall Plan. It worked wonders in Central Europe.

Idealistic? Perhaps. But as long as I don't see the Bush administration make even the smallest move in this direction - being stingy about it if not outright hostile to the very notion - and pour all its money instead into military action (aimed, to wit, at a place that wasn't involved in jihadist terrorism in the first place), I see us losing the war on terrorism.

It has also, historically, been the breeding ground for deeply felt spirituality and a commitment to live honorably and decently.

Dean's pretense--that a moral person thrust into poverty becomes a terrorist--is as absurd as it is offensive and insulting to those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Bin Laden did not send poor people to attack the US on 9/11. Not one of our attackers was from a poor background. Dean's on the wrong side not only of reason and common sense here, but of the facts as well.

No, Scrat - my guess is that for such a "choice" attack Al-Qaeda selected the "top class". But many of the perpetrators of other attacks (note the Casablanca example) were.

To know who's shy of which facts you would need to have a list of not just the 9/11 hijackers, but those bomb-placers in Indonesia, the Phillipines, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi-Arabia as well. Cause thats the footsoldiers we're talking about. Them and all the people who must have hid them and helped them ...

Straw man: Dean doesnt say, anywhere, that "a moral person thrust into poverty becomes a terrorist". Perhaps he didnt say it because its so patently untrue, and he's not a fool. ;-)

What he did say is that a life in ignorance and poverty provides a spendid breeding ground for extremists to peddle their ideology. When there's lots of people lacking educational and economic prospects (who are, ergo, ignorant and poor), and who yearn for someone to offer them an alternative - guaranteed salvation or at least some practical support - then it's easy scoring for the fundamentalists.

They are often the only ones to go in and provide networks of social help, schools, etc. They won't win 'em all over, and of all the sympathisers they will win, only a scattered few will go on to help terrorists, let alone become one - but the reservoir will be a lot bigger than if these had been people with prospects of a better life.

What I think Dean's quote is missing is how such extremism can be all the more attractive to those who are just above true misery. Who have enough education and have seen just enough of the world (or their town) to see that their parents' toiling is no God-given fate, but a better life is possible - but who see no way to reach any of it, due to whatever combination of economic hardship, represssive government, nepotism and corruption, etc. They might be an even more volatile "breeding ground", and as urbanisation speeds up without economic growth keeping up, this group will become larger.

But the point you seem committed to missing is that those choosing terrorism crosses class boundaries, which makes the argument that poverty breeds terror quite inconsistent with reality.

(edited to correct typo)

Would you say, Scrat, that living in a culture with limited democratic traditions, little in the way of civic culture, and dominated by a religion that is generally intrepreted in a rather belligerent way, would make one more likely to stray onto the extremist path?

If I would point you to examples of extremists who hailed from well-established secular democracies, would I be negating your point?

I would not.


To some extent, sure, but it would be a matter of degrees. Getting back to the point at hand, I think it is fair to say (if not obvious) that people with little hope have little to lose and might be more easily led than most to do something like blow themselves up, but that doesn't really have anything to do with poverty breeding terrorism, does it? The person in my hypothetical example wasn't moved to take up terrorism as a protest to his impoverished existence, rather he was preyed upon by others and used as a tool because of the (theoretical) increased likelihood that he'd be willing to kill himself. Add to that the practice of making cash payments to the families of suicide bombers, and suddenly terrorism becomes an economic choice for these people, not a political one.

It might be true that perceiving yourself to have no other options might tend to lead you to crime or terrorism, but that's a flaw in your perception, not a feature of poverty, and it's why I advocate acting to raise the perceived opportunity cost of terrorism and to lower the perceived opportunity cost of other, peaceful avenues of redress.