TRUTH REVOLT
by Bradford Thomas
June 15, 2015

“It is not poverty and misery that creates religious extremism. It is religious extremism that creates poverty and misery. And death.”

…Haroon Ullah, a senior State Department advisor and field researcher in South Asia and the Middle East, debunks the two most prominent explanations for why people are susceptible to terrorism: poverty and ignorance. Though the left continually points to lack of resources and education as the central cause of the rise of Islamic terrorism…Ullah said after living in Pakistan he found those two rationales to be demonstrably false. In Pakistan, he explains, he found “something much different than I expected. Poverty had little to do with who became an extremist; lack of education even less.” He found, instead, that many terrorists come from middle class families and have college educations. The draw to radicalism was not one of economic desperation or susceptibility due to a lack of education, it was a longing “for meaning and for order,”…READ MORE