Terrorism IS NOT caused by joblessness : Clarion Report

[muman613]

The oblamma administration, through it's SD spokeswoman Ms Harf made news recently when she stated that the way to combat terrorism is by offering young muslims jobs. When I heard this I nearly fell on my keester... This theory has been proven to be false many, many times as can be demonstrated by pointing to so many terrorists who come from well-to-do families or have gone to prestigious universities... I do not believe terrorism is in any way related to joblessness. Obviously we can point to periods in the past when joblessness was even greater than today, and terrorism was virtually non-existent... We can also point to periods when unemployment was low and terrorism burst like gangbusters.

But the administration is just looking for more excuses to excuse the brutal, blood-thirsty, muslim jihadist...


http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/state-dept-official-isis-we-need-find-them-jobs

State Dept. Official: ISIS Terror Motivated by Joblessness
Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf maintains that the root cause of the Islamic State (ISIS) is unemployment and poverty.

State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf is the target of a satirical #ISISjobs hashtag after saying that the root cause of the Islamic State (ISIS) is unemployment and poverty. There’s a bigger, less humorous point to be made: Her invalid views were held by the past two administrations, and Harf, herself, was a Middle East analyst for the CIA and national security communications advisor to President Obama during the 2012 campaign.

“We cannot win the War on Terror, nor can we win the war on ISIS by killing them. We need to find them jobs. We need to get to the root cause of terrorism and that is poverty and lack of opportunity in the terrorist community,” she said.

That didn’t fly with MSNBC host Chris Matthews, to whom she made the comments. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer politely held back some of his puzzlement when she defended herself on his program afterwards. She smugly said that “it might be too nuanced an argument for some.”

Study after study has proven that there is no connection between Islamist terrorist recruitment and poverty, unemployment and lack of education. This was the conclusion of a survey of 400 Al-Qaeda members all the way back in 2004, as well as the determination of a Queen Mary University survey published last year.

Simple observations and basic logic falsifies this Marxism-rooted theory that terrorism is basically the result of class warfare and social inequality. The top terrorists are highly educated and usually come from the middle class or higher. And, obviously, the purpose of having a job is to improve one’s life. Joining a terrorist group isn’t exactly a promising career choice.

The issue here isn’t the errors made by Harf. It’s the fact that this discredited premise continues to permeate the national security apparatus over a dozen years after the 9/11 attacks. Harf wasn’t speaking off the cuff. Consider her biography and the broader implications of the kind of influence she has had based on the positions she has held.

Harf started as a Middle East analyst in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, where her assessments sometimes made it into the president’s daily briefing. She then became the CIA media spokesperson. This indicates our best analysts are beholden to flawed assumptions that should have been discarded long ago.

Next, Harf  joined President Obama’s re-election campaign and, as per her bio, “was responsible for all national security and foreign policy issues on President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.” She oversaw his national security-related messaging. She then advised (former) Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and, finally, became the State Department’s Deputy Spokesperson in June 2013.

The same misunderstanding that Harf espouses was held by President George W. Bush and is still maintained by Secretary of State John Kerry. President Obama said that the vicious Boko Haram terrorist group is a byproduct of poverty and inadequate social services. Harf quoted U.S. Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell and claimed her view reflects the consensus of military and counter-terrorism experts.

This gives us a look into the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to change conventional wisdom, even when confronted with facts and credible academic studies. Harf is just the face of a government stuck on autopilot.

This has severe national security repercussions. Look no further than Major-General Michael Nagata, the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, who said of the Islamic State last year, “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”

This is outrageous because the Islamic State doesn’t leave much room for interpretation about its beliefs. It spells it out clearly in its English-magazine magazines, publicly lays out its Islamic interpretations and explains its ideology in its bloody video releases with English captions.

It’s outrageous, but not surprising if you look at the pattern since 9/11 and especially since the Islamic State burst onto the scene. You can’t possibly grasp and counter the Islamic State’s ideas if you somehow believe that rejected job applications compel people to become Islamist executioners.

Harf’s embarrassing flub is the result of the administration’s policy of bending over backwards to deny the Islamist ideological source of the threat. President Obama even went so far as to deny that the Islamic State is neither Islamic nor a state; both of which it clearly is, regardless of whether Muslims view the group’s  Islam and its state as legitimate.

This is what happens when you deny the existence of an ideology that most Americans and Arab leaders like the Tunisian and Egyptian Presidents clearly see in front of their eyes. Non-descript terminology like “Countering Violent Extremism” is becoming an exponentially greater source of frustration for Americans as a specific ideology is displayed in video after video.

This is the second time that the State Department’s ideology-denial has led Harf to embarrass herself on national television.

President Obama spoke about the Islamic State at the United Nations and upheld a terrorism-supporting cleric who authorized killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq as a model Muslim ally. If that wasn’t bad enough, the State Department had to apologize for doing the same thing only months earlier.

Harf was deployed to appear on the Kelly File to try to give something remotely resembling a coherent explanation. She did not even know about the State Department’s earlier mistake and questioned the credibility of reporting about the “moderate” cleric, only to retreat when given the facts.

The interview went so poorly that Megyn Kelly tried to help her out with some sympathy, saying, “You handle yourself well. I apologize because they [the State Department] put you in a very difficult position today. It wasn’t me. It was them.”

Yet, Harf stated strongly that she believed every word of what she said. She stuck to her guns that choosing the Islamist cleric as the Muslim model against the Islamic State was the right decision.

 

This episode isn’t about a State Department spokesperson sticking her foot in her mouth. It’s about a policy where the U.S. government publicly grasps for straws to find any explanation for the Isalmic State other than Islamic extremism. And, even more disappointingly, Harf and other top policy-makers actually believe easily discredited theories and use them to accomplish that counterproductive objective.

 

Ryan Mauro is ClarionProject.org’s national security analyst, a fellow with Clarion Project and an adjunct professor of homeland security. Mauro is frequently interviewed on top-tier television and radio. Read more, contact or arrange a speaking engagement.
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[muman613]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16503#.VOajEXXN_RY


Op-Ed: The Cause of Terror? It's Not Poverty

Only the Obama administration still thinks that jobs are the answer.

So it turns out the Obama Administration does have a strategy for combating terrorists: give them jobs.

In a remarkable exchange with MSNBC's "Hardball" host Chris Matthews on February 16, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said: "We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s a lack of opportunity for jobs, whether--we can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.”

Yet study after study of the motives of Arab and Muslim terrorists during the past two decades has found exactly the opposite

Between 1996 and 1999, relief worker Nasra Hassan interviewed nearly 250 Palestinians who either attempted to carry out suicide bombings, or trained others for such attacks, or were related to deceased bombers. She reported (in The New Yorker): "None of [the bombers] were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs…Two were the sons of millionaires."

The attacks on September 11, 2001, focused new attention on the causes of Islamic terrorism. The New York Times reported that the personal details concerning the hijackers had "confounded the experts."

"They were adults with education and skill, not hopeless young zealots," the Times said of the attackers. "At least one left behind a wife and young children…They were not reckless young men facing dire economic conditions and dim prospects, but men as old as 41 enjoying middle class lives."

In 2002, Prof. Alan Krueger of Princeton and Prof. Jitka Maleckova of Prague's Charles University studied the lives of 129 Lebanese Hezbollah terrorists who were killed in attacks on Israel. They found that as compared to other Lebanese, the Hezbollah members "were less likely to come from poor families and were significantly more likely to have completed secondary education."

That same year, the Muslim writer Hala Jaber spent four days with Fatah's Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, which organized a number of suicide bombings. She found that their members were "educated [and] middle class."

In 2004, Prof. Alberto Abadie of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government undertook a study of terrorists' motives. When he started, he thought that "it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty." By the time he was done, he had concluded that there is "no significant relationship" between the economic conditions in a given country and the rise of terrorists there.

So why is a State Department spokeswoman presenting job creation in the Arab world as the centerpiece of the administration's strategy for combating ISIS?

And why do President Obama and his aides still stubbornly cling to the utterly unscientific idea that poverty causes terrorism?

Because in their hearts, they want to believe that we hold the key to ending terrorism in our own hands , so that ISIS can somehow be defeated non violently. That if we just give them enough financial aid (over $10-billion to the Palestinian Authority alone since 1994), they'll stop stoning and bombing and burning and beheading us.

That's what they think. But the evidence says otherwise.

 
(The authors are president and chairman, respectively, of the Religious Zionists of America, Philadelphia, and candidates on the Religious Zionist slate (www.VoteTorah.org) in the World Zionist Congress elections.)

[IsraelForever]

oDUMBama is such an IDIOTbama!  On so many levels!  He's like the liberal idiots who wear Che Guevara shirts and have Guevara's poster on their walls and really know nothing about Guevara and how most of them would be in prison under Guevara.  We are talking about people who reach conclusions based on their utter stupidity and their simple-minded reasoning.  Do I need to list all the countries on this planet with high unemployment and where you don't see ISLAMIC-style terrorism?  Our President (yeech!!) is a simple-minded person who comes up with simple-minded reasoning and excuses. 

May Hashem protect us in the future from idiots like this!

[angryChineseKahanist]

so crime, and now, terrorism is caused by the evil capitalist free marketer.

[Kahane-Was-Right BT]

Excellent article.