Clash of Civilisations?

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But the most significant point here is that Bhutto is completely misrepresenting what is generally understood by “Clash of Civilisations”, and in a way designed to appeal to Guardian readers. Samuel Huntington is referring to the clash between Western civilisation – liberal, democratic – and Islam. It is in large part the post-Christian nature of Western society that Islamic fundamentalists find most offensive. But to portray it as a clash between the fundamentalisms of Islam and Christianity is to play on a familiar Bush-hating theme – Bush as Christian-fundamentalist-moron, and Iraq as (misplaced) revenge for 9/11.

Bhutto’s piece is headed “Without a war on poverty, we will never defeat terror. Dictatorship and religious extremism are fuelled by gross inequality”. Again a favourite Guardian line, but demonstrably untrue, as has often enough been pointed out. Here’s Walter Laqueur:

It is not too difficult to examine whether there is such a correlation between poverty and terrorism, and all the investigations have shown that this is not the case. The experts have maintained for a long time that poverty does not cause terrorism and prosperity does not cure it. In the world’s 50 poorest countries there is little or no terrorism. A study by scholars Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova reached the conclusion that the terrorists are not poor people and do not come from poor societies. A Harvard economist has shown that economic growth is closely related to a society’s ability to manage conflicts. More recently, a study of India has demonstrated that terrorism in the subcontinent has occurred in the most prosperous (Punjab) and most egalitarian (Kashmir, with a poverty ratio of 3.5 compared with the national average of 26 percent) regions and that, on the other hand, the poorest regions such as North Bihar have been free of terrorism. In the Arab countries (such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but also in North Africa), the terrorists originated not in the poorest and most neglected districts but hailed from places with concentrations of radical preachers. The backwardness, if any, was intellectual and cultural — not economic and social.