Letters to the Editor
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‘London Terror Plot Suspects Were Mostly Foreign Doctors’
In your recent report on the terror attempts in Glasgow and London, you mention that six of the eight terrorists were young, qualified Muslim doctors [Foreign, “London Terror Plot Suspects Were Mostly Foreign Doctors,” July 3, 2007]. However, it should not be surprising that the terrorists come from middle and upper-middle class families, not from poor, uneducated families as is often assumed. Several major recent studies show that this is almost always the case.
A 2001 report by a Pakistani relief worker, Nasra Hassan, based on 250 interviews with aspiring Palestinian suicide bombers and their recruiters, concluded that, “none were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed.”
A 2002 study by the distinguished Princeton University economist, Alan Krueger, showed that members of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah were less likely than other Lebanese to come from poor homes and more likely to have received a secondary school education.
Also, a 2004 study by a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Marc Sageman, and a former Central Intelligence Agency case office in Afghanistan during the late 1980s, concluded that “Most Arab terrorists … were well-educated, married men from middle-or upper-class families, in their mid-20s and psychologically stable.” When it comes to terrorism — it’s not the economy, stupid — it’s ideology.
MORTON KLEIN
National President
Zionist Organization of America
New York, N.Y.
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