The Root Causes of Terrorism

In the days since the London bombings, numerous journalists, pundits, and commentators have reexamined one of the basic questions facing the world today: what causes certain young Muslim men (and a few women) to turn to terrorism and suicide bombings? Is it poverty, alienation, and sociocultural grievances, as many liberals have claimed? Is it a lack of freedom and democracy, a cause that many prominent figures such as Natan Sharansky and Victor Davis Hanson promote? Or is it Islam itself, a view radio commentator Michael Graham most recently espoused.

The answer, as it turns out, has little to do with the first explanation and plenty with the latter two. First of all, it has been very definitively established that poverty and alienation do not in themselves cause terrorism. Here are the results of a study that confirms that over 75% of Al Qaeda terrorists are from the upper and upper-middle class, and that over 60% of them have received a college education. Clearly, these are not poor people. And besides, if poverty truly caused terrorism, then we would expect the great majority of terrorism to come from the world's poorest nations such as Tanzania and Madagascar. But it does not.

No, the one common denominator among terrorists is that they are followers of radical fundmentalist Islam. But is this caused by Islam itself, or a lack of freedom and democracy? Most writers have tried to separate the two, claiming that it comes almost exclusively from one or the other. But the reality is that the two are very intertwined and the real culprit behind terrorism is the combination.

First, let's look at Islam. The vast majority of terrorists are certainly practicing Muslims, and among world religions, Islam is the only one that consistently produces terrorists. Why is this so? There are many passages in the Koran that encourage the spread of Islam through violence. Numerous Islamic radicals have justified horrendous acts of terrorism on verses such as these. Their goal is to spread Islam across the world, and based on their interpretation of the Koran, the ends are justified by any means, even the most horrible violence.

This fact, however, falls short of a full explanation. After all, while most terrorists are indeed Muslims, it is also undoubtedly true that the vast majority of Muslims are certainly not terrorists. And this is where freedom and democracy, or more specifically the lack of it, steps in.

Any society has its extremists, and books of many religions can be (and have been) used to sanction violence. In democratic countries, however, such ideas rarely take hold because people have freedom of speech, freedom of information, and freedom from being intimidated if they criticize their leaders or refuse to follow a certain religion or political party. It is hence very difficult for an extremist in, say, the United States to develop a large following. David Duke, for example, is an American white supremacist, but he has no power to force people to accept his views. On the other hand, David Duke as a leader of an unfree country would be a serious threat. Robert Mugabe is a black supremacist who rules Zimbabwe and look at the horrors to which he has subjected his country.

Not surprisingly then, most Muslim terrorists come from unfree dictatorships where they are led by extremists who silence dissident. There are plenty of terrorists from autocratic Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Authority, but you don't hear of them coming from democratic India or Turkey. In Israel, it is almost exclusively Palestinians who are terrorists - not the Israeli Arabs, who make up one fifth of Israel's citizens. Islam itself may be the initial motivation for terrorist leaders, but it is the lack of freedom in their countries that allows them to crush dissent and cower the rest of the population into passively supporting them.

But wait, you might be saying, what about the London bombers? England is a democracy, but weren't they homegrown terrorists? Yes they were, but the society they inhabited was not the same society that most Britons live in. By allowing radical Muslims to enter the country and preach hatred of the West, England inadvertently allowed these people to come in and set up their own mini-unfree societies right in the heart of the country. Because the British government and police wouldn't touch them, these radical leaders created the same lack of freedom in their own neighborhoods as they did back home. In other words, Londonistan.

The good news, however, is that this can all be prevented. Western governments should not tolerate this kind of hate speech at home, and should encourage freedom and democracy in Muslim countries abroad. The US has taken a lead on this in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now that Europe is finally waking up to this reality, it's time for them to join the fold as well.