Saudi Arabia has already had surprising success with a pilot program that does just that, he says. In prison, jihadists undergo psychiatric counselling to convince them that using violence to bring about change is unacceptable, and recruits with little education get a chance to study and debate Islamic law.
… "In the future, the world looks young and poor and that’s the segment of the global population to whom radicalism is going to be most appealing," he says. "So it you decide to treat that entire group of people as though their entire political opinions are nothing short of a disease because they don’t align conveniently with Western interests, you are setting yourself up for disaster."
via Terrorism rehab: Fighting jihad with writing, art contests.
Yeah, don’t make me laugh: that’s why the Jordanian Jihado-terrorist who killed 8 people in a CIA secret building in Afghanistan had been rehabilitated. And also two ex-GITMO also were "surprisingly successful" after Saudi Arabia’s psychiatric counselling in… escalating posts for being leaders of AQ in Yemen. Experts say that the program is not carrying substantial changes on Jihadists’ views, only they are taught to stay away from terrorism:
In 2009, Horgan visited several of the Saudi terrorism rehab centers to report on the programs for Homeland Security.
"These guys are not being de-radicalized. They are being encouraged to disassociate from terrorism, but that doesn’t mean their fundamental views changed," said Horgan, director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State.
The second statement (poverty causes terrorism) is even more striking. Bin Laden is a millionaire but it’s not the only one. Most of them are educated (Al-Zawahiri) and have travelled to the West to study and live, something only rich people can do, specially considering their countries’ background:
It is a common myth that poverty creates terrorists, but this caricature doesn’t bear out. To the contrary, members of radical Islamist terror groups tend to be better off economically and more educated than their demographic cohorts.
This is easy to support anecdotally. The world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, comes from an immensely wealthy Saudi family. His top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a trained doctor from an upper-middle class Egyptian family. The leader of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Mohammad Atta, was a graduate student in Germany. One of the 2005 London bombers left an estate valued at over $150,000. The list goes on.
Empirically, the evidence is even more compelling. In a study of Palestinian Islamist terror organizations from 1987 to 2002, Princeton economist Claude Berrebi discovered that members of these organizations were frequently better educated and better off economically than the Palestinian Arab population as a whole.
Read it all…
The last example is Pantybomber: his father, one of the richest businessmen in Africa, is also one of the main promoters of Shariah Law in Nigeria and abroad. Mr. Muttallab Sr. denounced him to the CIA only when he thought that his son’s behaviour could damage his interests in Western countries.
Related posts:
- Court rules Saudi Arabia not responsible for 9-11
- Napolitano finally admits Fort Hood massacre was “Violent Islamic terrorism”
- The educated Muslim terrorist
- President of India talks directly to his people about Terrorism…through Yahoo!
- US Gov’t: “Iran remains most active state sponsor of terrorism”
- Oxford: Obesity more dangerous than terrorism
- UCLA Professor: Defending Terrorism and Palestine
- LA Times: America’s tolerance for terrorism should not be zero
- How to Fight Islamic Terrorism Online
- Austria fighting Terrorism too: 3 arrested
