Crazy Rich, Educated Terrorists

Photo from Very Funny Pics

By Chester B Cabalza

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic 
(Copyright @ 2019 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved).

The Easter bombing in Colombo at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, presumed to be an Islamic retaliation to Christians, after the bloody Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand by a white supremacist, confusedly created a breed of terrorists.

That terrorism is often a bourgeois endeavor now. 

Gone were the days when a pack of suicide bombers and violent extremists, believed to be poor and ignorant, or thousands of insurgent foot soldiers lured by drug cartels were paid for monthly wages to spread havoc among civilians to unseat governments.

Global intelligence report shows that two of the suicide bombers in Sri Lanka were heirs of millionaires from the spice trade. The poignant death of infamous millionaire terrorist Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks in the U.S., revealed by CIA that Osama has obligated his whimsical yearning to donate his wealth worth $29 million for jihad. The same socioeconomic construct was used in carving the images of Abdullah and Omar Maute, famed wealthy brothers who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and defied Philippine armed forces with their flawed gutsy urban warfare in the Marawi siege.

So, why terrorists have become so rich and educated?

Econometrician Alberto Abidie’s 2004 paper on ‘In Poverty, Political Freedom and Roots of Terrorism,’ uses country-level ratings on terrorist risk from the Global Terrorism Index of the World Market Research Center, an international risk-rating agency to assess terrorism risk in 186 countries and territories. He measures poverty by capitalizing on World Bank data on per capita gross domestic product as well as the United Nations Human Development Index and or the Gini coefficient (a measure of country-level income inequality).

By using Freedom House's political rights index as a measure of country-level political freedom, Abidie employs measures of linguistic, ethnic, and religious fractionalization. Finally, he includes data on climate and geography, since it is well known that certain geographic characteristics -- such as being land-locked or in an area that is difficult to access -- may offer safe haven to terrorist groups and facilitate training. He concludes that after controlling for the level of political rights, fractionalization, and geography, the 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.

Former CIA case officer Marc Sageman’s 2004 study on ‘Understanding Terror Network’ counters U.S. government strategies to combat the jihad that are based on the traditional reasons that rakes major issues on poverty, trauma, madness, and ignorance. He refutes, combining his skills as a political scientist and a psychiatrist that all these notions, showing that, for the vast majority of the mujahedin, social bonds predated ideological commitment, and it was these social networks that inspired alienated young Muslims to join the jihad. These men, isolated from the rest of society, were transformed into fanatics longing for martyrdom and eager to kill.

On same league, former foreign service officer and forensic psychiatrist Alexander Lee’s 2011 book on ‘Who becomes a terrorist?’ probes that while social backgrounds of terrorists have found that they are wealthier and better educated than the population from which they are drawn, political behavior have shown that all forms of political involvement are correlated with socioeconomic status.

Opinion writer Itai Zehorai deems in his 2018 article that it is no coincidence that the deadliest terror organizations in the world are also the wealthiest. Financial means are an essential necessity for terrorist organizations. But means of fundraising are inherently limited and are conducted primarily through underground channels, outside of and above the law in the global shadow economy.

Education plays a double-edge sword. It can halt terrorism from escalating conflicts but it can also propagate terrorism from playing. For instance, extremists from Boko Haram stormed into a school in Dapchi, Nigeria, and captured approximately a hundred young girls. The same group captured hundreds of other girls in a raid on the village of Chibok in 2014. Or, could it be religion? Wahhabism, a hard-line strain of Islam blamed for breeding militancy, proposed a direct path to God, albeit one that aimed to return the religion to the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Simply, there are no correlations and formulas. Terrorism exists because humans create it themselves.

Hence, the search for purpose and snap for martyrdom elevate terrorism in a visceral level of existential plinth, and irrespective of the socioeconomic status, it brings together wealthy and educated terrorists as one. Vladimir Putin deems that “terrorism has no nationality and religion”. But Adolf Hitler, in his fluke proverbial words had to utter, “demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.”  

At the end, terrorism can still be linked to political and social exclusion dynamics, poor governance structures as well as religious and ethnic discrimination. But the more wealthy, privileged, educated and influential they may be, we have to understand these new breed of terrorists have so much to lose (wealth, class privilege and opportunities), as constantly they inspire others to the cause disrobing them of worldly possessions which conceals a heavy sacrifice on their part to achieve a mission to become more worthy of a higher calling to strengthen their legitimacy.