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"Terrorists don’t care about poor people, except as . . useful targets for their atrocities."
by Andrea Harris

Mr. Muhammad Yunus, the economist who recently won a Nobel Prize for his Grameen Bank (a scheme that helps poor people — real poor people, not people who spend all their paychecks on lotto tickets) with loans, is a good man who has done great things. However, like most charitable people who have spent large amounts of time helping the poor (really poor people, not people who can’t balance their checkbooks and so never have enough money to pay rent — hey, is that a mirror I see before me?) he sees everything through the lens of poverty. It’s the worst kind of naiveté, because whenever they comment on some other pressing world problem, stuff like this comes out:

. . .

“We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time,” Yunus told hundreds of guests at City Hall in Oslo, Norway. “I believe putting resources into improving the lives of poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns.“

You know, it is possible that poor people need the protection guns can afford too. But besides that, here’s the silliness: the idea that poverty causes terrorism. Let’s see… NO IT DOESN’T. Let me remind you all: Osama Bin Laden is (or was, depending on whether he really is a smear in a cave in Afghanistan or not) as rich as can be. His father is as rich as Croesus, and whenever another member of the gigantic Bin Laden family is mentioned it’s always with some sort of phrase like “hotel magnate” appended. I think it safe to say that no member of the Bin Laden family is a dirt farmer in Yemen.

But that’s one rich terrormaster. What about the others, his underlings? Well…. Muhammad Atta, the 9/11 “mastermind” (to use the Bondian phrase so beloved of media people) was an upper-middle-class doctor’s son who had enough money to come over here (and we don’t make it cheap for people to immigrate legally), settle in various areas of Florida, and enter flight school, all of which takes a considerable amount of money. They used boxcutters on the planes not because they were too poverty-stricken to afford submachine guns, but because boxcutters are (or were) easier to sneak on board a plane than submachine guns. And all of the other of the Nineteen were similarly upper-middle-class in origin — and the “upper middle class” designation I am using is the American one, by which I mean their families had a lot more prestige and money than mine ever did.

It can’t be said too many times: terrorists don’t care about poor people, except as abstract fodder for their ideals and useful targets for their atrocities. Kids are even better — dead kids make everyone cry and get scared, the sort of effect terrorists are looking for. Terrorists don’t want to make the world a “better place” for poor people. What terrorists want is power.

TERRORISTS WANT POWER. TERRPORISTS WANT POWER. TERRORISTS WANT POWER. And until people realize this, we are always going to have terrorists.
Posted by: Mike 2006-12-13
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=174945