Does Poverty Lead to Terrorism?

The Islamist terrorists who struck in Michigan, Virginia, and New York last week didn’t know each other. They didn’t belong to the same terrorist group. And they attacked three very different types of targets.

But they had one important thing in common: they didn’t fit the stereotypical profile of a terrorist.

For years, certain politicians, diplomats and pundits have promoted the theory that poverty is the main cause of terrorism. That belief has been the basis for some major U.S. foreign policy initiatives, such as aid to the Palestinian Authority.

Give people jobs—these “experts” say—and then they will have something to lose, so they won’t resort to terrorism.

According to that view, the typical terrorist is young, unemployed, and single. But again and again, the actual biographical details of terrorists tell a different story.

The terrorist who attacked the synagogue in Michigan last week, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, was 41. He had children, he was gainfully employed at a local restaurant, he had a house, and he had a car. Yet he packed his car with explosives and went looking for the nearest Jews to blow up.

The Islamist fanatic who murdered a professor on the campus of Old Dominion University, in Virginia, likewise was much older than the so-called typical terrorist. He wasn’t in his teens or early 20s, and he wasn’t unemployed. Mohamed Bailor Jalloh was 36, and he had respectable job, serving in the Virginia National Guard.

The extremist who threw a bomb at protesters near Gracie Mansion in Manhattan last week was younger than the others; Emir Balat was 18. But nothing else about him fit the supposed profile of a terrorist.

“When he was only 13, he programmed bots to buy pricey sneakers the moment they dropped,” the New York Times reported.  “His father would drive him to the parking lot of a Wawa convenience store, where he would sell them to a sneaker dealer, sometimes making more than $200 a pair.”

When he was in high school, Emir “began selling contractor supplies online — flooring, sinks and vanities, mini-splits and power tools.” He had a thriving business. He was making a lot of money, especially for a teenager. He, too, had plenty to lose.

There’s a great deal of anecdotal evidence along these lines from other Islamist terrorist attacks in the United States.

For example, Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up Times Square with an explosives-filled SUV in 2010, was a 30 year-old father of two with an MBA and a job as a financial analyst.

Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were a middle-class Muslim couple, both college graduates. He worked as an environmental health specialist. They had a six-month old daughter. Then they massacred 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino in 2015.

Demographic analyses of groups of terrorists have found similar patterns.

Consider the 415 Hamas leaders and activists whom Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deported to Lebanon in 1992. Dozens of them were medical doctors, university professors, or administrators of institutions of higher education. Three-fourths were married; one third had between one and four children, and one-fourth had five or more children. They, too, had a lot to lose.

Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from “comfortable backgrounds,” terrorism expert Dr. Brooke Rogers wrote in NATO Review in 2012. Two-thirds of them had attended college, some had master’s degrees, and most had professions. Likewise, Rogers noted, “two‑thirds of British terror suspects are reported to come from middle‑class backgrounds.” She concluded that there is ample evidence “that directly contradicts the assumed link between poverty and terrorism.”

Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, who studied the connection between poverty and terrorism for the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2002, concluded that “having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary school or higher education is positively associated with participation in Hezbollah.” Similarly, James A. Piazza, writing in the scholarly journal Terrorism and Political Violence in 2006, concluded that “contrary to popular opinion, no significant relationship between any of the measures of economic development and terrorism can be determined.”

The phenomenon is not limited to Islamists. Studies by scholars of the Nazi era have found that a large majority of elite SS officers were university-educated professionals, and many had doctorates. Timothy Snyder, in his book Bloodlands, notes that 15 of the 25 commanders of the Einsatzgruppen—which massacred over one million Jews in Eastern Europe in 1941-1942—had doctorates.

From the Holocaust to contemporary Islamist terrorists, it seems clear that poverty is not the cause of terrorism, and education and jobs are not its cures. Last week’s attacks across the United States have illustrated that fact once again.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.