MEMRI translate some recent articles by Arab columnists pointing out that terrorists are motivated by cultural and religious factors, not poverty (nor, indeed, “because they can see no other way of attaining justice”). For instance, in the United Arab Emirates daily Al-Itihad, columnist Abdallah Rashid has this to say:
“The greatest mistake of the social and political commentators is their attributing the cause for the spreading of the phenomenon of terrorism in the Arab and Islamic world solely to the lack of social justice, the spreading of poverty, and the harsh social conditions in most of the Arab and Islamic countries.
“The socio-economic situation of most of the terrorists who participate in the criminal operations around the world is very good. Thus, for example, Faysal Zayd Al-Matiri, a young Kuwaiti man from an economically well-off family, went to Fallujah to fight alongside the terrorists supporting the Al-Qa’ida organization, together with the terrorist Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi. He left behind his parents, his wife, and his three girls. He was killed in the fighting, leaving a widow, three orphan girls, and stricken parents mourning his death…
“Interrogations by the Iraqi authorities of terrorists arrested during raids and searches in Iraqi towns revealed that most of the Saudi youth and some of the [youth] from the Gulf who went to Iraq to join the Al-Qa’ida terrorist groups come from families that are not poor and from a social environment that does not suffer from economic problems.
“What is the reason for the involvement of the Arab Muslim youth in such criminal and despicable acts?
“The simple reason is the terrifying brainwashing suffered by most of the Arab youth at the hands of ‘religious clerics’ and particularly at the hands of the extremists with backward views. [These ‘clerics’] nourish the Muslim youth with various kinds of racist views and destructive extremist principles, and nurse them with hostility, hatred, and resentment towards other people and towards members of other divine religions.
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