Mick Hartley

Those who insist on blaming terrorism on deprivation and poverty are, it seems, always with us. However much the terrorists may shout "Allahu Akbar", proclaim their allegiance to ISIS, and expound on the coming glories of the caliphate, there are still those who insist that this is all about the disenfranchised wretched of the earth making their voices heard in the only way available to them.

One such is Natasha Ezrow, from the University of Essex. She's even styled a "terrorism expert" by the BBC:

A terrorism expert says more needs to be done to tackle the spread of home-grown extremism.

Natasha Ezrow, from the University of Essex, told BBC Breakfast that people "need to reach out to disenfranchised communities" to "target the deep causes of these grievances".

She was speaking five days after the attacks by Islamic State militants in Paris.

More expert advice was forthcoming from Ezrow a couple of weeks back in the Washington Post - All terrorism attacks are not connected. But terrorists want you to think that they are. After listing just some of the recent attacks - in Egypt, Yemen, Nigeria (Boko Haram), Turkey, Somalia – she cautions against making any connection:

This is a horrific spate of attacks, and it should disturb us all. As the scale of what had happened became clear, there was naturally some speculation that the attacks were somehow connected or coordinated. But although the headlines are certainly alarming, all the attacks occurred in countries facing very specific challenges. Rolling them into one “wave” of violence is misguided, and misunderstands the real nature of global terrorist threats.

Nigeria’s seven-year Boko Haram insurgency has claimed more than 20,000 lives and forced 2.6 million people from their homes. Somalia, a country whose collapsed government is propped up by the United Nations, has been fighting an insurgency against al-Shabab for more than a decade.

Turkey, meanwhile, has been involved in a three-decade-long insurgency against the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party in the southeast that has killed tens of thousands of people. Yemen is mired in a hugely complex conflict that has killed more than 10,000 people, while Egypt is still racked by violent unrest after a revolution and then a coup.

So it’s not altogether surprising that these countries should be facing attacks that claim significant casualties, nor is the use of terrorist tactics something particularly new.

The nature of war has changed; most victims of conflict are civilians, and more of the tactics used are unconventional. Terrorist attacks aren’t just used by terrorist groups — which hide clandestinely in cells but hold no territory and do not have a militia — but also by insurgents, who use them as a tactic in low-intensity conflicts. Terrorism is a cost-effective way to kill many innocent civilians — but more importantly, it’s as efficient a way as any to make headlines.

In recent decades, terrorism was principally used by organized groups to strike against richer Western democracies. But today, 70 percent of all terrorist attacks are of the lone-actor variety, and terrorism is more commonly taking place in zones of conflict and instability. Although these conflicts are rooted in grievances of inequality and exclusion, each event is not linked to the other. Although it’s possible that some groups have been inspired by one another — the Tamil Tigers, for instance, pioneered the use of suicide vests — an act of terrorism in Cairo has nothing to do with the bombings taking place in Somalia….

Terrorism’s preeminent effects are psychological rather than physical; it has a way of skewing our perceptions, meaning that we perceive a bigger menace than actually exists. To fight it, we need to fight back against these psychological tricks. So long as we go on assuming that terrorist attacks are connected and trying to link them to a global extremist threat looming on our doorstep, we misunderstand the unique problems facing each country — and what’s needed to defang them.

"Grievances of inequality and exclusion". Hmm. The only grievance they have in common is that we aren't yet living under Sharia law and following the will of Allah. But no need to mention Islam – though the Tamil Tigers get a nod there, you'll note. Anyway, let's just calm down and put things in perspective. The death toll's not much more than die from gun violence in America. 

Jeffrey Tayler at Quillette takes the whole thing apart (via Jerry Coyne):

Reason, honesty, and a decent respect for reality posit a counter-argument to this evasive pseudo-analysis. Since 9/11 Islam has been the principle motivation for terrorists across the globe. The FBI, as of May 2016, was tracking almost a thousand potential Islamist radicals in the United States, with 80 percent of them tied to ISIS. In Europe, the scale of the Islamist threat has overwhelmed the French security services, and that country, as a direct result of a spate of ghastly Islamist attacks, labors through its second year under a state of emergency….

The progressives’ reluctance to address Islam derives in part from the erroneous liberal notion that “all religions are the same” (if that is the case, where, then, as Sam Harris has asked, are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers?) and from outright ignorance about the doctrines of Islam — mainstream Islam — that can generate violence; namely, those concerning jihad (holy war) and martyrdom. Muslims waging war against “infidels” are carrying out God’s orders, and those who die doing so win immediate entry into paradise. (Of course proportionally few Muslims turn to violence, but those few are forcing this conversation upon us.) Other factors — say, Ezrow’s “grievances of inequality and exclusion” — may or may not be present. But belief in, and a willingness to act on, the doctrines of jihad and martyrdom are determinative and motivate the terrorist violence. Just as the terrorists themselves tell us.