The media has continuously told us that the terrorist attacks perpetuated by those who use texts and tenets of Islam to justify their actions are motivated by poverty and desperate conditions at home. Many people buy into this, simply because it is easy to see a victim when that persons actions are tied to being abjectly poor. Jihad activity is routinely blamed on poverty, and the simplistic answer is; if there was no poverty, there would be no reason to kill those responsibile for that poverty.
Reality proves this to be false. Most large jihadist attacks have been done by people who are fro from poverty, most were in college or had degrees in medicine, engineering and other "hard" sciences. It is funny, then to see Yemen, a country once at the forefront of the "blame poverty" movement, now claiming that poverty is irrelevant to jihad.
Which is it? You can't have it both ways.
From Yahoo News/Associated Press Dec 22 by Sarah El Deeb
Nearly half the population lives below the poverty line of $2 a day and doesn't have access to proper sanitation. Less than a tenth of the roads are paved. Water is running out. Tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes by conflict, flooding into cities. The government is riddled with corruption, has little control outside the capital, and its main source of income — oil — could run dry in a decade.
As a result, al-Qaida is far down on a long list of worries for most Yemenis, even as the United States presses the government to step up its fight against the terror network's affiliate here.
Yet Yemen is still the revolving door for Islamists travelling between Somalia and points south and west. Poor Yemenis have never been part of the bigger problem, they mostly have suffered at the hands of their co-religionists.
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