Tell me again why this is such a good idea.
Germany’s top court blocked the extradition of a suspected al Qaeda financier to Spain, ruling on Monday that a key instrument in the European Union’s fight against terrorism breached the constitution.
The Federal Constitutional Court ordered the release of Mamoun Darkazanli, a German-Syrian fighting his handover under an EU arrest warrant, a new instrument the court said Germany had not implemented correctly.
In doing so, the court upheld an article of the post-war constitution preventing the state from extraditing its citizens, with only limited exceptions.
DF – The planners and key operators in the 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 attacks were all either upper or middle class, as are bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, and KSM. Their motivations aren’t based in economic inequality, either personal or at the macro level, so trying to solve Islamist terrorism via a Marxist/class-based approach probably won’t work.
So basically this fellow Darkazanli is free as long as he doesn’t set foot in a country where the EU warrant is recognized? Wouldn’t surprise me if he got on a flight to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and didn’t come back.
Britain has a thriving economy. The perpetrators of the 7/7 bombinb of the London tube appear to have been British Muslims born in Briton of Pakistani descent with good educations and good jobs.
Poverty does not cause terrorism as tagryn pointed out above. Occupation does not cause terrorism (we’ve just had a long discussion thread about that).
If I had to look for the root causes of terrorism, I think I would concluded that the factors include a sense of entitlement, shame, envy, and radical clerics who whip their followers into religious frenzy based on a sense of entitlement, shame, and envy.
You know, I think this terrorism as a factor of the poor is the wrong model. I’ve been working on another model. Think back to Western history several hundred years ago in Europe. We had the high nobility who had everything and the poor who had very little. We also had a lot of the younger sons of the high nobility who had little to do and not much chance of really inheriting anything. They tended to get board/wanting to prove themselves and one of the outlets they had was to push for wars to be fought. I’m beginning to wonder if the Islamofacists aren’t someething similar: The scoins of the idle rich having little else worthwhile to really prove themselves push for war.
What do others think?
StargazerA5
I believe that terrorism is the result of too many reasons to name. No single model will account for all of the young people involved, from Palestine to our own John Walker Lind in CA. When we try to figure out what drives those young people, we should look to our own young people. We have suicides, school shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. All of these actions result from various motivations. It is the leadership of the terror groups that recruit using all of these motivations just as our military recruits using assorted motivations, although from the other end of the spectrum. The terror group leadership can take an individual contemplating suicide and give them purpose, give adventure to the bored, provide a sense of belonging to the outcast, make the loser into a hero (in their view of course), and provide for the family of the unemployed. They do what ever is necessary to reach them. This is probably their biggest crime because they do no reach them to help; they reach them to sacrafice them to the cause of terrorism.
Mullah Omar and his crowd were absolutely, positively banking on the fact that their enemies would have to employ a law enforcement model to prosecute any real action against them. Don’t you remember his repeated mantra from when he was sitting comfortably atop Afghanistan — what proof do you have, what PROOF!?! — of aiding Osama bin Laden.
Yet we have clowns desperately insisting we play just that silly game. Stupid is as stupid does.
Has it not occurred to these people to examine closely the Sunni treatment of the Shiite and vice-versa? What does economics have to do with that? Social security?
The root of al-Qaeda terrorism, as far as this hack is concerned, is centered on [1] the arrogance of a leftist mindset (faith, anyone?) that does not recognize the limits of human reason, and [2] the arrogance of a world faith that believes its use of one language since its founding makes it superior and above interpretation.
That, my friends, is a lethal combination: it is at once pissing on faith and standing on faith — a depraved cocktail if ever there was one.
To All and #1 Digitaini
As a working LE professional in a large So Cal PD(pop300K) with over 30 yrs exp both as street cop and as an invesitgator I’ve given this topic considerable thought.
The public’s perception and level of expectations of LE is driven by the media’s protrayals e.g. TV police shows which are largely a far stretch from reality. Many politicians and top police administrators are relunctant to to rectify this image. Consequently the public’s expections are unrealistic and when they interact with the real police they are disatified with performance. In the GWOT particuliarly at the federal level a false sense of security is protrayed which I call “feel good responses” when in reality what is done has little to do with any preventative ability.
The mindset of first responders is flawed. It should be “first preventers” as the former implies we all the enemy a first strike which in the case of WMD too be honest SUCKS! You can’t cover all the bases you must play offense to win this war.
For those interested see the following link to the Int’l Association of Chief’s of Police (IACP) position/policy on the role of LE in the GWOT. In the thread scroll down to several pieces including:
The Traditional LE Paradigm is Ill Prepared to deal with the GWOT
Link Here
GWOT and AQ are not a manifestation of poverty except perhaps Israeli/PLO. The PLO thru it’s own dealings and corruption of its leaders may have poverty components but AQ is not drivern by poverty.
GWOT and AQ aredriven by a cult-like religious sect of Islamofascism. See this piece over at Roger L. Simon’s. Follow the links and threads back through several political sites in the Blogos:
The line must be drawn in the sand!
RLS Link
StargazerA5: “Think back to Western history several hundred years ago in Europe. We had the high nobility who had everything and the poor who had very little. We also had a lot of the younger sons of the high nobility who had little to do and not much chance of really inheriting anything. They tended to get board/wanting to prove themselves and one of the outlets they had was to push for wars to be fought. I’m beginning to wonder if the Islamofacists aren’t someething similar: The scoins of the idle rich having little else worthwhile to really prove themselves push for war.
What do others think?”
I think you’ve been terribly misled, as I was too, by historians and interpretations of the Crusades that used to enjoy the highest possible reputation, but were false to the root and have been decisively refuted by modern research, which has shown that the people who went on crusades and their motives were not at all as the cynical conventional wisdom that you trustingly recited has always claimed.
The old view rested on the flimsy basis that historians, like other academics, used to refuse to take the power of religious ideals as seriously as they should have. It was all too antique. Nobody one knows is like that! They dismissed it with easy assumptions, which were not considered to need any great research to back them up. The research finally was done, and it blew all this old stuff out of the water.
If you want to continue to use the crusades as a basis of your thought, you need to read good books by solid modern historians like Jonathan Riley-Smith (best or equal best), Norman Housley (my favourite, and I very warmly recommend his book The Crusaders (link to review at http://www.deremilitari.org) as your starting point), and Thomas F. Madden (also very good). To get you going, here is an article by Thomas F. Madden in National Review Online (link) that tells you for free and in capsule form what you most urgently need to know about the Crusades.
I’m not putting you down. I used to be fooled too. That’s just how it is. I would not have been doing any favours to let you persist in reciting that line till someone well-informed and not so kind-hearted as I am called you on it impolitely.
Methinks the Germans are not letting this guy get extradited lest they be next. They are taking the Spanish approach rather than the English one. But then again when have the Germans been any use in W.o.T.?
Yet another example of the collapse of the EU.
It’s good in a very limited way: it shows the courts are being sticklers on upholding the law. Given the occasional tendendency of (esp Roman-law based) European courts to bend to the will of the executive, thats no bad thing.
Besides, the EU arrest warrant IS a problematic concept. Better would be a thorough updating of extradition treaties and getting legislatures to pass the bills required.
But it also demonstrates, as Ron Wright says, that in operations _outside_ the area of “rule of law” states, law enforcement and legalistic proceduralism may not be a useful way of dealing with enemies.
The question is, at what point should states start to go extra-legal _within_ the “rule of law” area.
The German laws will be modified to allow the extradition to proceed and that the German authorities are keeping a very short leash on the guy so that he doesn’t skip. Just the German penchant for following the rules in overdrive.
Der Spiegel
The court has called for a revised version of the law, and Zypries has promised to deliver it in four to six weeks. In its ruling, the court gave Zypries specific guidelines for improvements. Among the court’s key concerns was the thought that a German sought by another country could be extradited before even getting a hearing here at home or tried in another country for something not against German law.
Terrorism does not occur due to poverty, bin Laden shows this. However, I do feel that the fuel for terrorism, by and large, does come from poverty.
Sure the 7/7 attackers were well established.
However, most, in fact I believe all, of the 9/11 attackers were poor.
All of the Palestinian refugees are poor. This leads me to believe if we reduced poverty and portrayed the US as more than a country who starts wars but also a nation that is helping those in abject poverty, terrorism would be eliminated.
First as the prior fella said it is not poverty but ignorance. Fed lies all their life, lied to and agitaged by hate filled mullahs and whatever they call “priests/pastors” over there and lack of fear. By that I mean we need to capture and horribly kill some of the terrorists. Painfully, slowly and publically/broadcasted. With humiliation. “See you terroist scum bags, you don’t poof die ina big explosion in a microsecond..you are whipped naked by western women till half dead, then fed to sharks/crucified/buried alive in pig shit. “
ed #16 – The GDP in the Palestinian territories dropped by 90% after the Arafat kleptocracy. Rather than poverty causing terrorism, it was terrorism that caused poverty. What’s more, if you look at the folks actually committing terrorist acts, numerous studies have shown that they are more likely to be upper or middle class, not poor.
The 9/11 attackers were not poor either. Many were engineers and all were at least middle class.
we need to capture and horribly kill some of the terrorists. Painfully, slowly and publically/broadcasted. With humiliation. “See you terroist scum bags, you don’t poof die ina big explosion in a microsecond..you are whipped naked by western women till half dead, then fed to sharks/crucified/buried alive in pig shit. ”
hmm… sounds like something some one who is scum his or her own self would do. See, I like to think that civilized western humanity is better than base, vile, contemptous activities. However I guess, there are still some barbarous monsters among us who still have not evolved from some deep cesspool of filth, waste, rubbish and disgust. Maybe they will always stay there, will their ideas still ever manifest in the mainstream? I would think not.
The “LE Pardaigm” is an extreme position. You cant do LE where the local state isnt interested in arresting terrorists (Afghanistan under the Taliban, arguably Iraq and Iran) or where there is no effective state (Somalia) and LE needs a lot of supplementing where the state exercise limited authority over large parts of its own territory (Pakistan, Lebanon) or arrests terrorist only half heartedly for political reasons (Pakistan, KSA). But where there are terrorist on the soil of fully functional states with well developed legal systems, and a will to carry out arrests – like the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, etc it IS correct to use LE. What would you do instead? Send the 3rd infantry to Lodi California and detain without charge anyone who looks suspicious? Where there is a proble with a particular law, that overly burdens the WOT without sufficient justification, such laws should be changed. That does NOT mean that what youre doing isnt still LE.
bq. All of the Palestinian refugees are poor. This leads me to believe if we reduced poverty and portrayed the US as more than a country who starts wars but also a nation that is helping those in abject poverty, terrorism would be eliminated.
Wow.
ed:
_”the 9/11 attackers were poor”_
Yes, mostly those poverty ridden Saudis.
Well, just imagine the trouble they could cause if they were rich, eh?
We’re just lucky there’s no resources like, say oilfields, for instance, in the neighbourhood, aren’t we?
/end snark
Poverty in the ‘palestinian’ instance is a creation of the terrorists’. There’s a case to be made that foisting the PLO on the palestinians and declaring them the “sole voice” of the palestinian people was hardly conducive to alleviating either terror or poverty, but let’s stick with Ariel’s figure: pali GDP fell 90% as a result of the PLO’s terrorist campaign.
No foreign investor is going to consider opening a call centre, or a computer graphics business, or an accountancy agency, etc, if they’re going to be subject to the restrictions imposed by the IDF. And, as evidenced by – to use the media’s term – the re-“occupation” of the territories, the IDF simply wasn’t present in serious numbers prior to the current ‘intifada’.
Let’s make things simpler: before the PLO arrived in the territories, terrorist attacks were fairly low and the palestinians were relatively prosperous.
After the PLO arrived, terrorism increased. Extortion and corruption increased. And IDF operations increased.
The one new factor in all of this was the PLO, ie, the terrorists.
Actually, most studies seem to show that terrorists trend toward the middle and upper classes, and are disproportionately drawn from the elites and profesional classes of their societies. Osama ain’t no pauper. Dr. Ayman Zawahiri didn’t get that title from some phony PhD is deconstructionism, or by applying to Dr. Evil’s “Summa Cum Evil” Evil Doctor Diploma Mail Order Course. Etc.
The “poverty” argument is a classic example of western leftist projection.
The truth is actually closer to the reverse: not that poverty breeds terrorism, but that the same cultural and belief factors that breed terrorism tend also to create non-competitive states and hence wider poverty.
The biggest problem of all is non-competitive states, produced by many of the same cultural and ideological factors that breed terrorism, which mask their poverty and obtain the resources to fund large-scale terrorism because they have a false economic prop (like oil).
The poverty rates in the Middle East are relatively low:
bq. Sub-Saharan Africa 46.4 %
bq. South Asia 31.3 %
bq. East Asia & Pacivic 14.9 %
bq. (China 16.6 %)
bq. Latin America & Caribbean 9.5 %
bq. Europe & Central Asia 3.6 %
bq. Middle East & North Africa 2.4 %
“Percentage of People living on less than $1 per day.”:http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2005/wditext/Section2.htm
The Middle East has a lot of unemployment and underemployment and lot of dashed expectations, but not poverty.
Uh, no. Many of the 9/11 attacks were clearly from middle class backgrounds. You don’t get to spend time and money studying in Europe without someone supporting you from elsewhere. Moreover, poor people tend to be poorly educated, and that tends to make poor pilots.
Mohammed Atta, lead 9/11 hijacker, was the son of an upper class merchant in Lebabon IIRC. The 7/7 terrorists were: a son of a wealthy Leeds merchant who was driving a brand new mercedes (oppressed because it was not the most powerful model); a schoolteacher; a Jamaican-ancestry convert to Islam who was middle class; and another middle class young man. The fifth conspirator was a Phd at Leeds who had been awarded a fellowship and was to start a new job researching chemical compounds.
The root cause of terrorism is Islam. Islam is an ideology and not a race or condition of wealth/poverty.
Muslims get up every day and are faced with the total failure of Islam and Islamic society to deal with the challenges of the Modern World. Whereas Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, parts of China, parts of India, and of course other parts of the West have succeeded greatly, Islam remains the province of backwardness, violence, oppression, weakness in all areas of society, and the inability to provide anything at all that even approaches the West much less matches or exceeds it.
Where are the great Mohammedan companies? The Mohammedan Nokia, or Sony, or Honda or Ikea? They not only don’t exist but really cannot ever exist in Muslim countries.
This is a problem because Islam explicitly promises that the world will one day be triumphantly ruled by a single man, the Kaliph (God’s shadow on earth) in a single unitary Islamic state, with no other religions. Because Islam is the final, authentic religion destined to replace all other false or (sadly debased such as Christianity and Judaism which were authentic but corrupted, hence Mohammed and Islam). God himself says so in the Koran.
To look around the world and see the material success of the hated, unclean infidel, and the failure of the faithful, is to suspect God is lying. This accounts for Muslim rage which is a feature of all Mohammedans from the 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 terrorists, Beslan murderers, or the so-called “moderate Mohammedans.”
You can’t be a “moderate Mohammedan” because Islam itself as an ideology depends on the final, universal triumph of Islam and material domination of the hated, unclean kaffir in the meantime. People in Egypt getting up in the morning and putting on Blue Jeans instead of Islamic dress, listening to Western Music or videos or movies, or Mohammedans in the West being attracted to the features of the West is enough to provoke this rage and the utter, inhumane violence that accompanies it.
What is the solution to this root cause? Snuff out Mohammedism or change it so radically (as Christianity has been changed) so that it is not a threat. Christians don’t burn witches at the stake, at most they hold political protests and figures like Eric Rudolph or McVeigh get caught and punished. It’s time for Mohammedans to get secularized and the Modern World to make it’s demands known. No more stoning of women to death, no more lopping off hands or heads, no more fatwas for writing books or making movies, and frankly no more devout Mohammedans.
Activists/Revolutionaries/Boat Rockers have always been part of the human condition, and will almost certainly always be part of the human condition. For thousands of years these people have plotted and planned to overthrow whatever the “status quo” was using brutal and violent methods.
Today in the US, 10’s of thousands, if not millions of people are conspiring to overthrow the McBushHitlerBurton cabal. In 2008, they will succeed.
For decades in the Middle East, the revolutionaries were “channeled”…go drive the Israeli’s into the ocean…overthrow the American puppet Pahlavi….kick the crap out of the Russian’s in Afghanistan…do anything but challenge the leadership of your own land.
The genius of democracy is that it doesn’t outlaw revolution, it embraces and schedules revolution. The vast majority of revolutionary talent and energy is consumed in an unending political debate.
RE: the recent ruling in Germany, here are some additional details… Helen Szamuely explains it all:
RTWT
As Dr. Phil would ask, “Now how is that working out for you?”
I’m casting my lot with Joe and Jim. With the exception of the Israeli/PLO mess, our enemy is largely well educated from families of some worth.
The attackers from the PLO have been from the slums of the refuge camps. I would lean more to the ideology of Islamofascism as the driving force as invoked by Ara the Rat. Ara the Rat and others pilfered money not only from us/UN but from the Saudi’s who were paying protection money to the tune of $10M to Ara the Rat. This was to keep his hordes out of Saudi Arabi.
The failure of this ideology is the secret to winning this war. See this tongue and cheek post over at Wizbang:
*****
[ed to fix sp]
Perhaps their ideology just plain sucks –
Jay,
Now let me get this correctly. Who started the victim shackdown bus in the first place. Was it Ara the rat who was taking money from both us and the Saudis, pocketed the money and never really passed it to his pals, and used Islmaofascism to have the slum dwellers in the refugee camps to become bombs? Or perhaps it was Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton? They seem to do a good job hustling around the country shaking down industry under the guise of victims and diversity?
My answer is why have the Israelis been able to prosper in the same area. Could it be their ideology just plain sucks.
Gee, as Dr. Phil would say, “how’s that working out for you?” Perhaps a change of tactics would help and get all the thieves out of the gov’t who pocket all the money.
Wiz Link
True enough, but this phenomenon is neither new nor exclusively Islamic. It was equally the case in the Russian revolution.
Correct, Kirk – and in most revolutions throughout history. The middle-to-upper class has always been by far the most dangerous group.
RE: the PLO’s recruitment tactics (beyond trolling for Down’s Syndrome kids and women who are told to blow themselves up to restore “lost honour”), I coverred that in one of the first things I ever posted on Winds, back when it was a solo blog:
“Suicide Economics”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/002931.php
“As noted in Terror, Inc.,”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/002430.php however, the PLO as an organization is very strongly professional and middle to upper class (as the joke goes, you’ll certainly be upper class once you’ve been in it for a while…), and this has always tied into its economc strategy via SAMED et. al. The professionalism of their economic operations and money management has actually blazed a trail followed by every other mega-successful terrorist group – and been a strong differentiator between terrorist organizations that last over the long term and those that didn’t.
_In doing so, the court upheld an article of the post-war constitution preventing the state from extraditing its citizens, with only limited exceptions._
in order to avoid the constant indictment of war criminals by formerly occupied countries?
the fact that most bombers and terrs are middle class hardly means that poverty is not an issue.
1. I follow Bernard Lewis – the problem is one of humiliation – its when a well educated middle class person looks at the civilization he identifies with, and sees it behind in everything – military, political, AND economic. The poverty of the entire society is ONE element in that sense of failure. (note personal humiliations of varius kinds also play a role)
2. The terrorists need “a sea to swim in”. In much of the islamic world that sea IS profoundly poor, and in western europe its often relatively poor.
3. Poverty, as Barnett would point out, is correlated with disconnectedness. The problem in places like NWFP, etc is not so much poverty per se, but isolation from the rest of the world, which makes it hard for states to impose order there. Develop them, connect them, and you make it harder for them to be refuges for terrorists. What difference does a middle class radical make, if he doesnt have a base?
4. Poverty, in a politically relevant sense, is relative to expectations. A muslim university graduate, whos living less well than a nonmuslim univ grad, is more likely to feel his deprivation intensly than a muslim peasant.
5. Poverty effects democratization. If democratization is part of our strategy, than poverty matters. Poor societies are rarely fully literate societies, with well developed civil societies. Which makes democracy very hard to maintain (yes, I know about India – which, prior to the ’90s, is a VERY problematic democracy, for a host of reasons)
Liberalhawk: I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I don’t think that “poverty “is the right word. Or at the very least, if we foccussed our attention on poverty, we would probably end up focussing on parts of the world that have little relationship to the WOT.
I like the phrase “relative deprivation,” which would include economic problems that defeat expectations. Donald Sensing has pointed out that this phrase has significance among religious historians since it has often led to eschatological ferver (hunger for a more ideal, religously pure time) in groups with religious identities.