re: #542 SixDegrees

I can’t speak for Walter, but Scientology has all the earmarks of a cult, yet markets itself - successfully - to the rich and well educated. Also, it seems to me that many of the 9/11 hijackers, and several others involved in high-profile terrorist attacks, have been college educated, at least. Bin Laden, if I recall, held an engineering degree, and Zawahiri is a physician. And Wahabism, centered in Saudi Arabia, receives huge influxes of cash from wealthy members of the royal family and their hangers-on.

Walter is correct that the correlation between poverty and terrorist activity is weak. I would suggest that poverty does, however, make certain types of recruitment easier that wouldn’t be effective in more affluent ranks.

A simple historical analogy… look at the French Revolution, fueled by young men with raising expectations that went unmet. Educated and not poor, they belonged to a society that didn’t offer them the outlet, they were frustrated and felt trapped… we know what happened next.

We see a similar thing happening to these Middle East terrorists.