CAMERA BLOG
Au Contraire, Prof. Piketty: Income Inequality Does Not Cause Middle East Terrorism
by Sean Durns
December 9, 2015

Economic disparities are a main source of terrorism and “Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.” So says French economist , who came to international notice after writing a book about income inequality (Capital in the 21^st Century, Harvard University Press, 2013) in a recent commentary for the French newspaperLe Monde. There are numerous holes in Piketty’s thesis, but they were left unmentioned and unfilled by a Washington Post column “This might be the most controversial theory for what’s behind the rise of ISIS” (Nov. 30, 2015). Piketty’s method seems to be drawing broad but questionable conclusions from research conducted on a very short timeline. Post writer Jim Tankersley notes that Piketty begins his analysis with the first Gulf War in 1991, concluding that Western powers worked to return oil “to the emirs.” This is a curious, stunted timeline from which to extrapolate, but it goes unchallenged by the paper. In fact, Islamist terrorism existed in the Middle East long before 1991. READ MORE