i agree.. bush and cheney come from wealthy backgrounds and they are first class terrorists, so the idea of poverty and terrorism don't seem to be directly connected....

I just found this pretty awsome article, The Last Patriot, that sheds some light on the first encounters america had with Jihadist back in the late 1700s. Its a really interesting article worth checking out.

Very late to this discussion because I just didn't have time to read through it earlier, but I have to say I find the musing over "causes of terrorism" simply absurd.

Terrorism isn't a discrete thing -- it's a tactic adopted by people who find they cannot achieve their ends by other means and hope that inflicting terror will win their objectives. It's a lousy tactic, both from a utilitarian and a moral point of view, but it is simply a symptom that some set of people find their aspirations unattainable.

It's not very hard to find this out: if there is one thing you can count on, it is that people who adopt terrorism as a tactic for advancing their ends will tell you, interminably, why they believe they have the right to fight you in this manner. If you want to know why they do it, listen to them.

You are probably not going to accommodate their demands, but it is not hard to find out what they are. (A little Caliphate there, a little whites-only slice of the US there ... etc.) The cause of terrorism is a group's inability to impose its demands on society -- the rest is over-intellectualizing.

Many British Islamist terrorists have had relatively privileged upbringings. Here are just a few examples: Mohammed Siddique Khan, the ringleader of the July 7, 2005 London bombings earned a decent salary as a primary school teacher; Shehzad Tanweer, another 7/7 bomber use to cruise around in his father's Mercedes; Omar Sheikh, the British militant who orchestrated the murder of Danny Pearl attended LSE; Omar Khan Sharif, the British militant who attacked a nightclub in Tel Aviv in 2003 attended elite British schools; Abdullah Ahmed Ali, the alleged ringleader of the 'Airlines' plot, came from a solidly middle class background. One of his brothers is an IT consultant, another a property developer and a third a probation officer (!) at Britain's Home Office.

I'm currently in London looking into violent extremism in the UK. The dynamics over here have direct implications for the national security of the United States. In 2006 authorities thwarted an Al Qaeda plot by British-born Muslims to bring down up to seven airliners leaving Heathrow for North America. The threat has not gone away. Britain probably has more Al Qaeda supporters than any other western country, two thousand of which now pose a security threat according to MI5

Terrorism isn't a discrete thing -- it's a tactic adopted by people who find they cannot achieve their ends by other means and hope that inflicting terror will win their objectives. It's a lousy tactic, both from a utilitarian and a moral point of view, but it is simply a symptom that some set of people find their aspirations unattainable.