With all due respect to the suspicious crown prince, I would suggest that he is seeing a mirage in the searing desert. American journalists and plain old regular folks are generally suspicious of his people and religion at present because of the unbelievably hideous things that some Arab Muslims have recently done to their country.

If I and many of my fellow journalists question and examine why such terrorist monsters as Osama bin Laden have emerged from Saudi Arabia and the Islamic faith, that is our right, and even our duty. No hidden or visible Zionist conspiracy is pulling our strings or guiding our thoughts. We are free men and women brought up with democratic values from the time we could tie our tiny American tennis shoes. That fact, and not Prince Abdullah's ridiculous allegations, explains our overdue reportage on the autocratic kingdom and the Islamic fanatics who have declared unbridled jihad war against America, Israel and the West.

David Dolan is a Jerusalem-based author and journalist who has lived in Israel since 1980. He reported for CBS Radio for over 12 years.

The Futile Search For
Terrorism's "Root Causes"

Michael Radu

Socioeconomic grievances, or so some assert, explain (though they do not justify) terrorism in general and Islamic terrorism in particular -- the factors Al Gore famously called this February "another axis of evil in the world: poverty and ignorance; disease and environmental disorder; corruption and political oppression," all of which lead to terrorism. But do they?

It is hubris to attempt to explain terrorism in general, let alone in its many different forms across time and place. The following observations are therefore intended only to refocus the debate, not to "explain" terrorism.

The desire to identify "root causes" and so be able to correct them is natural. Root causes "have" to be there -- at least in the American mind. There must be an explanation for the inexplicable: why a teenaged Palestinian girl would blow herself up in an attempt to kill as many Jews as possible, or privileged young men of the Arab world plot to kill themselves while murdering thousands of American civilians. But much as the frequently asked question this fall, "Why do they hate us?" had flawed premises and yielded flawed answers, framing the question as "What are the root causes of terrorism?" leads too easily to looking at the usual suspects: "poverty," "injustice," "exploitation," and "frustration." Like the man in the parable who looks for his lost keys under the streetlight instead of where he lost them because "the light's better," it's easier to look in these familiar areas than to face and address the real problems.

Those who hold to "poverty as the root cause" do so even though the data do not fit their model. Even leaving aside multimillionaire Osama bin Laden, the backgrounds of the September 11 killers indicate that they were without exception scions of privilege: all were either affluent Saudis and Egyptians, citizens of the wealthy Gulf statelets, or rich sons of Lebanon, trained in and familiar with the ways of the West -- not exactly the victims of poverty in Muslim dictatorships. Many poor Egyptians, Moroccans, and Palestinians may support terrorists, but they do not -- and cannot -- provide them with recruits. In fact, al Qaeda has no use for illiterate peasants. They cannot participate in World Trade Center-like attacks, unable as they are to make themselves inconspicuous in the West and lacking the education and training terrorist operatives need.

Indeed, ever since the Russian intellectuals "invented" modern terrorism in the 19th century, revolutionary violence -- terrorism is just one form of it -- has been a virtual monopoly of the relatively privileged. Terrorists have been middle class, often upper class, and always educated, but never poor. The South American Tupamaros and Montoneros of the 1970s were all middle class, starting as cafe Jacobins and graduating into urban terrorism, as were their followers among the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades, France's Action Directe, the Sandinista leadership in Nicaragua and, before it, Fidel Castro's Cuban revolutionaries. Considering the composition of many of the antiglobalist groups today, it is a safe bet that middle class, prosperous, and self-righteous as they are, they will soon provide the recruits of a new wave of terrorism in the West -- as we may already be seeing in the revival of Italy's Red Brigades.

To say that economic conditions are not the root cause of terrorism is not to say that there are no conditions that correlate strongly to political violence and terrorism. There are phenomena we should be concerned about in this regard, it is just that they are far less obvious than poverty and much more complex to address.

Outpost               - 8 -               May 2002