Ever since September 11th, people have wondered what it is that can cause seemingly education men like the 9/11 hijackers to fall prey to an ideology so extreme that they are willing to commit mass murder. Some would argue that it is something inherent in the nature of Islam that causes this, but that misses the point. Every religion, every society, has extreme ideologies that could conceivably motivate people to kill others and themselves. The question is, what happens to cause someone to be receptive to that type of idea.

At least one Princeton economist thinks he knows the answer:

When Princeton economist Alan Krueger saw reports that seven of eight people arrested in the unsuccessful car bombings in Britain were doctors, he wasn’t shocked. He wasn’t even surprised. “Each time we have one of these attacks and the backgrounds of the attackers are revealed, this should put to rest the myth that terrorists are attacking us because they are desperately poor,” he says. “But this misconception doesn’t die.” (…) “As a group, terrorists are better educated and from wealthier families than the typical person in the same age group in the societies from which they originate,” Mr. Krueger said at the London School of Economics last year in a lecture soon to be published as a book, “What Makes a Terrorist?” “There is no evidence of a general tendency for impoverished or uneducated people to be more likely to support terrorism or join terrorist organizations than their higher-income, better-educated countrymen,” he said. The Sept. 11 attackers were relatively well-off men from a rich country, Saudi Arabia.

So if it’s not poverty, what is it then ?

So what is the cause? Suppression of civil liberties and political rights, Mr. Krueger hypothesizes. “When nonviolent means of protest are curtailed,” he says, “malcontents appear to be more likely to turn to terrorist tactics.” Which — ironically, given that Mr. Krueger is no fan of the president’s actual policies at home or abroad — is close to Mr. Bush’s rhetoric: “Liberty has got the capacity to change enemies into allies.”

And when you look at the Islamic world, what do you see ? Without exception you see repressive states ruled by cliques, royal families, or President’s-for-life. You also see near uniform repression of virtually any form of political and social expression. And some of these countries are our “allies”; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan are all repressive and all of them have been the home of men who have participated in the mass murder of Americans and Europeans.

Ironically, there is one nation in the Middle East that comes close to being a free state, and it’s the one that is targeted by the terrorists even more than the United States……Israel.

H/T: Mises Economic Blog