Terrorists who perpetrate attacks are not who ‘experts’ say they are - opinion

Children, clergymen, and Israeli citizens supposedly are among the Arabs least likely to carry out anti-Jewish terrorism. They don’t fit the profile. And yet all six of the most recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by precisely those individuals.

Supposedly, the “typical” Palestinian Arab terrorist is a young Palestinian Arab man, single, uneducated, and unemployed, who turns to violence because of his difficult personal circumstances.

But the terrorist who was shot dead while throwing firebombs at Israelis near Ramallah on March 4, Mustafa Abu Shalbak, was just 16. 

The next day, a Palestinian Arab terrorist named Muhammad Shehadeh stabbed and seriously wounded an Israeli near Bethlehem. The would-be murderer was 17.

And the day after that, a Palestinian Arab stabbed and wounded an elderly Israeli man standing at a bus stop in Jerusalem’s Neve Yaakov neighborhood.

Not only was the attacker just 14 – presumably too young to fit the profile of the “typical” terrorist – but he was a resident of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem’s Arabs are supposedly more “moderate” than those who live in the Palestinian Authority territories. Well, not much moderation was on display in that attack.

The terror attacks continue

There were more “unlikely” terrorists in the days to follow. Near Bethlehem on March 13, Muhammad Abu Hamed, age 15, stabbed and wounded two Israelis, one of them a teenager.

The terrorist in a March 14 attack, Fadi Abu Altayef, was a married man. Supposedly, Arab men who have spouses are less likely to murder Jews, because they have something to lose – if they are killed while committing terrorism, or are imprisoned, their wives and children if they have any will suffer. 

Moreover, Abu Altayef was an Israeli citizen – which supposedly indicates that he was loyal and peaceful.

Apparently, none of this mattered. He stabbed an Israeli man to death, and wounded three others, in a coffee shop near Beersheba. Not exactly an Israeli “settlement.” No “occupiers” in sight. The attack was in pre-1967 Israel. But the victims were guilty of a very serious offense, in Fadi’s eyes: drinking coffee while being Jewish.

On March 16, the terrorist was a Muslim clergyman. Members of the clergy are supposed to be “people of peace.” Aren’t we always being told that Judaism and Islam are “Abrahamic faiths” that share a vision of a peaceful world? Apparently the vision of Mahmoud Nofal, Imam of Hebron’s Al-Qassam Mosque, was not quite so peaceful.

Armed with a Kalashnikov rifle – one can only wonder how he obtained it – Imam Nofal staked out a position in the city’s Jewish cemetery and began shooting at nearby Jewish homes. Fortunately, Israeli soldiers eliminated the imam before he managed to massacre his targets.

The notion that children, married men, and clergymen are unlikely to become terrorists – the idea that poverty is the main cause of terrorism – has been disproven not only by recent incidents such as these, but by study after study of the motives of Arab and Muslim terrorists.

From 1996 to 1999, relief worker Nasra Hassan conducted interviews with some 250 Palestinians who either attempted to carry out suicide bombings, trained others for such attacks, or were related to deceased bombers.

Writing in The New Yorker, she reported that “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.”

After the attacks on September 11, 2001, The New York Times reported that the personal details concerning the hijackers had “confounded the experts.” It turned out that the attackers “were adults with education and skill, not hopeless young zealots,” the Times revealed. “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.”

A study in 2002 by Prof. Alan Krueger of Princeton and Prof. Jitka Maleckova of Prague’s Charles University focused on 129 Lebanese Hezbollah terrorists who were killed in attacks on Israel. They found that 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.”

In 2004, Prof. Alberto Abadie of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government examined terrorists’ motives. When he began his research, 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.

Given all of the above, why do so many “experts,” politicians, and pundits still stubbornly cling to the utterly unscientific idea that poverty causes terrorism? 

Because in their hearts, they want to believe that the key to ending terrorism is in our hands – that if we just give the Palestinian Arabs enough financial aid (the US has sent over $10 billion to the Palestinian Authority since 1993), they’ll stop all their stoning and bombing and burning and beheading. So the politicians close their eyes to reality, and keep signing the checks. What a tragedy!

The writer is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose writings appear regularly in the American and Israeli press.