The Archbishop of Canterbury, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, King Abdullah of Jordan, Elie Wiesel, terrorism experts and even President Bush have argued that people turn to terrorism because of poverty or lack of education. Alan Krueger, an economics policy professor at Princeton, did a study on the economics of terrorism. An excerpt from his book “What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism,” published in The American, concludes otherwise:
“The evidence suggests that terrorists care about influencing political outcomes. They are often motivated by geopolitical grievances. To understand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extremist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.”