The only effective way to stop people from committing acts of terror is to fight poverty in the...

[YoungDemCA]

18. One problem with your thesis: Most terrorists do not come from poor families

Mohammed Atta (one of the 9/11 hijacker-pilots) was the son of a lawyer, and a university graduate. Ziad Jarrah (another of the hijacker-pilots) actually came from a wealthy family that was secular in practice. Ayman al-Zawahiri comes from a family of surgeons, and is a surgeon himself. And I don't think I need to mention Osama bin Laden's wealthy and privileged family background.

These are not the poor, downtrodden masses of the Middle East. These are more often than not, the "best and the brightest"-from educated, solidly middle-class (and some from very wealthy) families.

One piece of the Krueger-Maleckova evidence involves 129 members of Hezbollah who died in action, mostly against Israel, from 1982 to 1994. Hezbollah is now designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. Biographical information from the Hezbollah newspaper al-Ahd indicates that the fighters who died were, on average, more educated and less impoverished than the Lebanese population of comparable age and regional origin.

A similar finding applies on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Israeli Jewish extremists who attacked Palestinians in the West Bank in the late '70s and early '80s. Many of the extremists were Gush Emunim members. A list of 27 of the Israeli terrorists reveals a pattern of high education and high-paying occupations.

Krueger and Maleckova also examine surveys conducted last December with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. These polls tell us about who supports terrorism, as opposed to who are the terrorists. One set of answers reveals a high level of support for the general policy of attacking Israeli targets. This support is stronger among the literate than the illiterate. In another question, a remarkable 80% of respondents thought that the suicide bombing last June that killed 21 youths in a Tel Aviv nightclub was not terrorism. (The respondents recognized overwhelmingly that this act was regarded as terrorism by international opinion.) Moreover, the Palestinians' adherence to the view that the mass murder of civilians was not terrorism was independent of education and higher among those working than unemployed. Hence, support for terrorism was not reduced by increases in education and income.

The same patterns apply outside of the Middle East. For example, a study by Charles Russell and Bowman Miller (reprinted in the 1983 book Perspectives on Terrorism) considered 18 revolutionary groups, including the Japanese Red Army, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang, and Italy's Red Brigades. The authors found that "the vast majority of those individuals involved in terrorist activities as cadres or leaders is quite well-educated. In fact, approximately two-thirds of those identified terrorists are persons with some university training, [and] well over two-thirds of these individuals came from the middle or upper classes in their respective nations or areas."

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2002-06-09/the-myth-that-poverty-breeds-terrorism