Terrorists Not Stupid (Just Their Actions)

Americans inaccurately imagine that all religious fundamentalists are emotionally volatile ignorants. In their immediate reaction to the attacks of 9/11, many emphathists pointed to the poverty ravaging Afghanistan as a contributing factor. Only weeks later did we learn that we'd actually been attacked by upper-middle-class Saudis. Interestingly, four years later many still accept the notion that we are threatened by men of simple means and simple minds who live in fitful envy of our great freedom and material wealth. This could not be further from the truth.

As David Brooks points out today in his Times column:

We know, thanks to a database gathered by Marc Sageman, formerly of the C.I.A., that about 75 percent of anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes. An amazing 65 percent have gone to college, and three-quarters have professional or semiprofessional jobs, particularly in engineering and science.

Most Americans would be shocked by those statistics, mostly because we've been fed a persistent caricature of terrorists as crazies in the mountains; Middle-Eastern hillbilly religious fanatics with access to crude bomb-making materials. This fallacy is counterproductive because it obscures the true ideological divide that exists--one much more sobering and substantive than we'd like to think.