This will come as a surprise to those — and they are legion — who assume that poverty causes terrorism. In reality, that claim is just a pretext for Western nations to write more checks to governments of Muslim countries. It’s demonstrably false. The New York Times reported that “not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.”
CNS News noted in September 2013 that “according to a Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.’”
Yet the analysis that poverty causes terrorism has been applied and reapplied and reapplied again.
“Indian doctor detonated car bomb in deadly attack targeting jail in East of Afghanistan,” Khaama Press, August 5, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
An Indian doctor detonated a Vehicle-borne Improvised Explosive Device (VBIED) in the initial phase of a deadly attack on a jail in eastern Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, it has been reported.
According to local media reports emerging from India, a medical graduate, hailing originally from Malayali of Kerala of India, detonated a car bomb close to the provincial jail in Jalalabad city, the provincial capital of India.
Identified as Ijaz, who had recently graduated from medical faculty in China, the suicide bomber detonated the car bomb to allow the other assailants storm the jail….