Poverty and Terrorism - Aiming for Well Armed Terrorists
My church recently preached that terrorism will continue to increase and be a problem until we redistribute the wealth of the planet and remove poverty. That is, the true cause of terrorism is poverty. The problem is, this is just plain old false.

After controlling for the level of political rights, fractionalization, and geography, Abadie concludes that per capita national income is not significantly associated with terrorism. He finds, though, that lower levels of political rights are linked to higher levels of terrorism countries with the highest levels of political rights are also the countries that suffer the lowest levels of terrorism. However, the relationship between the level of political rights and terrorism is not a simple linear one. Countries in an intermediate range of political rights experience a greater risk of terrorism than countries either with a very high degree of political rights or than severely authoritarian countries with very low levels of political rights.

... Finally, this study reveals that geographic factors -- such as measures of average elevation, tropical weather, and country area -- are also powerful predictors of terrorism

The only disappointing thing is that he didn't investigate religion as a predictor of terrorism.

Now the problem is, if poverty isn't the cause of terrorism, and we try to cure terrorism by redistributing wealth, what happens? You simply get better financed terrorists. A recent report highlights a similar effect, where "militant British Muslims" are becoming more and more common. Why? The UK has granted Muslims more freedoms than any other liberal democracy. Living in the UK, these Muslims are more than likely in the top 10% of the worlds richest people. From an article by Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, International Director of Barnabas Fund, was published in the Evening Standard newspaper, London, 4 September 2006

the UK’s well-meaning policy of validating every faith and ethnic community culturally, in a depoliticised way, is naïve when it comes to Islam. For Islam does not separate the sacred from the secular: it seeks earthly power over earthly territory. The result is that already the UK has reached the stage of parallel societies, where purely Muslim areas function in isolation.

Worse, this is about to be made semi-official. In West Ham a gigantic mosque is planned by the radical Tablighi Jamaat group. The London Thames Gateway Development Corporation says that the new mosque will make West Ham a "cultural and religious destination". This will be nothing less than an Islamic quarter of our capital city....Just as important, communities minister Ruth Kelly has already excluded faith schools from the remit of her examination of integration and cohesion. Yet many Islamic schools are known to nurture values that are radically different from those of the prevailing society.

Multiculturalism creating seperate, isolated communities. Schools teaching values that a contrary to living in a liberal democracy. These things are breeding grounds when it comes to a hostile ideology. And make no mistake, the Muslim faith wants a theocracy, and will try to turn back the clock from the liberal democracy that Christian's have instituted.

The big question is, how do our own Islamic schools in Australia fair?
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, September 08, 2006