| The Root Cause of Terrorism? Not Poverty or Lack of Education Indonesian Policies and Quirks When it comes to identifying the root cause of terrorism, many are compelled to point fingers on poverty and lack of education. The argument, in a nutshell, goes somewhat as follows: Poor, uneducated people are easily lured to promises of heaven and blowing other people up to attain them. However, such theory does not stand its ground when confronted with facts. Marc Sageman of Foreign Policy Research Institute compiled the background data of around 400 Al-Qaeda members and discovered that three quarters of his sample belonged to the middle or upper class. He further noted that, "[T]he vast majority –90 percent—came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that's usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways." Economists Efraim Benmelech of Harvard University and Claude Berrebi of RAND Corporation also came to the same conclusion when they gathered data on Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel from 2000 to 2005. They discovered that education is very much valued in the "terrorism market." Better educated individuals are more likely to be successful in carrying out large-scale terrorist attacks and have lower chances of getting caught. It should also be noted that the alleged leader of the 9/11 attack, Mohammed Atta, had a graduate degree, while both Azahari and Noordin Top, masterminds of the major terrorist attacks in the last decade in Indonesia, were skilled engineers and scientists. None of them were poor; all three came from affluent families. Obviously, the majority of terrorists in the world don't fit the poor and uneducated profile. As such, simply expanding education and eradicating poverty would unlikely affect terrorist recruitment. We need to look deeper. In that light, there are at least three issues that are often overlooked, each bearing a consequence in how public policies should be shaped and how we as the community should act in countering the seeds of terrorism. |
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