Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The root cause of terrorism


The Washington Post reports:
The 23-year-old Nigerian man accused of the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an American airliner apparently turned to the Internet for counseling and companionship, writing in an online forum that he was "lonely" and had "never found a true Muslim friend."

"I have no one to speak too [sic]," read a posting from January 2005, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was attending boarding school. "No one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems."

"He always did the bare minimum of work," [Fabrizio Cavallo] Marincola [who studied with Abdulmutallab at University College London] said of his classmate, who he said was nicknamed "Biggie."

"When we were studying, he always would go off to pray," Marincol continued. "He was pretty quiet and didn't socialize much or have a girlfriend that I knew of."
Hat tip: Instapundit.

In all cultures, there are young, depressed, lonely people who may occasionally feel suicidal. What is different about Islam is that it offers such people an easy path to honor and glory through the killing of infidels. In other cultures, by contrast, achieving honor and glory tends to require sustained hard work.

RELATED: While Democrats tend to believe that the root cause of terrorism is poverty, Michelle Malkin discusses "the wealthy, pampered lifestyle of would-be Christmas Day bomber Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab."

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of terrorism
-Gitmo torture: Metallica is proud of its music's message to terrorists
-Speaker Pelosi's deep thoughts on giving Miranda rights to terrorists.
-AG Eric Holder was for enhanced interrogation before he was against it.
-The NY Times finally admits we were fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq
-Gitmo torture tactic revealed: "she touched my thigh!"
-NY Times skeptical of Bush but trusts terrorists
-Global warming predicted to cause more terrorism
-Before Al Qaeda: the socialist-terrorist alliance of the 1980s
-Islam forbids silk neckties for men

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dostoyevsky made a similar remark about anarchists in The Brothers Karamazov, namely that "these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal, such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them."

Anonymous said...

Mm.

Wasn't that one of the issues the Ft. Hood shooter had? Trouble meeting other people (especially women) who were up to his standards?

StarBanker said...

Why would he be lonely? The Big Mo (May he rot in hell) Made it so. Mo needed an army, young, unattached men make the best army. The Koran and Hadith specify relationship law, in particular: You must have a lot of money to marry (young men don't have any money), you can marry more than one woman (rich old men can afford many), women are sequestered from meeting anyone not related (parents looking to secure wealth for the family enforce this rigorously) and strict taboos on sexual desires (with Islamic humans not camels (interesting on the road distraction).
The net result is what we see in all Islamic countries. hoards of unattached, sexually frustrated young men with little hope of getting laid until their thirties or forties. Mo's army was allowed to liberally rape and pillage as their reward for fighting and camels buggered for those long trips on the road.
No doubt that a reward of 72 virgins and a chance to stare into the eyes of Allah for eternity sounds like a great new life compared to the hell on Earth that they see ahead.
The "Root Cause of Terrorism" is Islam itself. Many Unicornists (Obamanites, Sodomites, Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Communists, Hollywoodists, Harvardists, MSNBCists, Newsweekists and the NY Timesists) think that an Islamic Reformation is the the answer, enough porn and Paris Hilton could could bring that about. What they don't understand is that a Reformation is in progress NOW. It's just heading in the opposite direction they wish...to the more radical. That is the reason that the primary targets of terrorists are other Muslims, the less Islamic Muslims. That is how Reformations work, making the soft middle fold.
Short of Ann Coulter's solution of "invading their countries, killing their leaders and converting them to Christianity", I can't think of a solution that doesn't involve nuclear weapons used over large swathes of the Earth.

Anonymous said...

In college many, many years ago, I had a (male) roomate from a Muslim country who hadn't spent much time in the West. The one thing that stood out more than anything else was the enormous difference between his expectations and my expectations. Afterwards, I'll never forget the deep sense of dread, that this guy in this environment was possibly downright dangerous. And there was nothing anyone could reasonably do about it. When various terrorist attacks started happening by Western college educated Muslims, it wasn't very surprising to me.

Anonymous said...

See, lack of "companionship" (i.e., sex) CAN drive you nuts.

Anonymous said...

That terrorists from Islamic countries come from their pampered classes is not new, nor is it unique to their culture.

Consider the Weathermen Underground here in the US. Look into the backgrounds of all the "Weathermen" - and you will find that Dorne, Ayers, etc - all but one of them was very pampered upper middle class, if not pretty much set for life even if they muddled their way through.

The only member of the Weathermen to express real remorse for what they did was their token working-class stiff, Mark Rudd. Ayers especially is unrepentant for their actions, and is comfortably ensconced today in academia with a tenured position.

Or take the German terrorist group, the Baader-Meinhof gang: only a couple of them didn't attend the university. Most all of them came out of the comfortable middle class. No poverty there. Baader was one of the few who didn't come out of the comfortable middle class.

Look today at the various environmental agit-prop movements: mostly all comfortable middle class. The "animal rights" movement is filled with white women of very comfortable means.

Poverty does not cause terrorism. The evidence is pretty clear and clean-cut on this.

AST said...

I don't think this is the root cause of terrorism, which is merely a tactic for asymmetrical warfare. It IS, however, the most common characteristic of the weak-minded losers,, who become pawns for the terrorists.

I remember a line from pro wrestler Fred Blassy: "They say these geeks are a dime a dozen. I'm looking for the one who's supplying the dimes!" In this case that would include the Iranian regime, a lot of Arab oil billionaires, and otherwise well meaning people being gulled by fraudulent charities. It also includes the radical imams who abuse our freedom of religion to preach jihad in mosques throughout the Western world.

Peter said...

I have spent some fairly lonely times in my life. Those times have never really wanted me to use my weenie as a wick to light a bomb that would blow the rest of me into fragments through the bulkhead of a jetliner.

I', for making the rich Saudis and the Mad Mullahs afraid of us for a change. We have sniper rifles that are effective at three quarters of a mile. We have missiles that we can choose which window they fly through. We have bombs that can land on a quarter and five fifteen cents change. So, why are those clowns not peeing themselves every time someone sneezes?

setnaffa said...

Narcissism... It was all about the terrorist... He should have tried to ease someone else's suffering instead of dwelling on his now missing "johnson"...

Adjoran said...

I don't wish to stir up the whole "religion of peace" pot all over again, but it certainly seems that, if "moderate" Muslims do not support the radicals, neither do they break a sweat opposing them.

In fact, the radicals do tend to spring not from the poor and oppressed so much as from the rich, privileged, and educated.

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