Indulged Jihadis

Beware Wealthy Islamic Zealots

It turns out that the murderers who killed so many innocents in Sri Lanka recently were members of the socio-economic elite in Bangladesh.  They had access to heaps of money.  They had the time to study overseas at various universities.  They had the opportunity and resources to indulge themselves in delusions and visions of Islamic apocalyptic grandeur. 

This is a pattern we have seen before.  The murderers who piloted airliners into the Twin Towers were part of a well-educated elite.  They had the money and time to speculate over Islamic extremist doctrines.  Osama bin Laden, of course, came from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia.  These patterns contradict the Left's view in the West which is that Islamic terror acts exist because people are poor. 

Former President Obama wheeled out this trope once again when commenting upon the Bangladesh terrorist murders.  He was quickly corrected of his prejudiced errors. 

Most of the jihadis who targeted Christians in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday with a wave of suicide bombings that left hundreds dead and wounded at churches and high-end hotels are “well-educated people” from affluent families, the South Asian island nation’s deputy defense minister revealed on Wednesday.

Deputy Defence Minister Ruwan Wijewardene’s comments contradicted assertions by former U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration that a lack of economic opportunities is a top driver of Islamic terrorism. . . . In March 2016, AP reported that ISIS was seeking to recruit well-educated individuals with sophisticated skills in Pakistan, noting that the group was targeting university students, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and businessmen and using educated women for its fundraising operations. [Edwin Mora, Breitbart]

The picture emerges that many of the perpetrators were lazy and self-indulged, apparently bearing a sense of entitled importance.
  Allah and his prophet, Muhammad owed them a lot.  A sister describes one of the murderers increasing "holiness and devotion":

Recalling the shock of his involvement in the atrocity in which the initial toll was thought to be 359, Mrs Hidaya opened the family photo album to show childhood pictures of the future bomber show the practical joker as a teenager, laughing with friends as he posed with a crocodile and other animals.  "He was a music lover and a funny boy," his sister said.  "It makes me sad to think what happened to him. Before he died he would not let his children listen to music and he never said a friendly word to anyone."

Even as a child he was always devout, she added, but had 'never taken it too far'. But on his return from Australia, he 'created tension' by berating his family for their religious lapses, she said.  "I had many arguments with him," his sister recalled.  "At first he started quoting scripture and I would say OK, you're right.    But then the conversation got deeper and deeper into religion and I couldn't follow what he was saying any longer.  He told male relatives off for trimming their beards and became angry and totally crazy. So I just stopped speaking to him because it got to the point where it was getting out of hand."
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Although Mohamed lived round the corner, the siblings avoided each other. She he came to visit their mother, who lived with Hidaya, he would ignore her.  "We even started using different roads to go to and from our houses," she said. [NZ Herald]

No doubt former President Obama will be out on the hustings again interpreting these events for us.  He will speak of poverty, of degradation, of the gulf between rich and poor. 

He is afflicted with a rich man's myopia.  The truth is something entirely different.