Scott Spiegel

So much for the lie that poverty causes terrorism.

Despite the mainstream media’s refusal to accept it, there is one factor more reliable than any other in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies:

(1) It’s not whether he lives in third world poverty and resents being overshadowed by the Imperialist West.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, was the son of a prominent, wealthy Nigerian bank chairman.  Abdulmutallab attended the British School in Togo and University College London, the latter of which cost as much as Obama shells out for his daughters to attend a semester at Sidwell Friends.  Abdulmutallab’s college dorm was a $6 million apartment in London’s West End.

If poverty caused terrorism, then a corollary of this argument is that a country’s efforts to relieve poverty should prevent terrorism.  Yet the U.S. provided Arlington, VA-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan with a free medical education worth tens of thousands of dollars, which apparently did not console him enough to keep him from murdering fellow soldiers on his military post in Ft. Hood, Texas.  Indeed, Hasan planned and carried out the attack after having been promoted from captain to major, despite miserable performance reviews.

John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and San Anselmo, California and attended a “California Distinguished School” in the Tamalpais Union High School District.

If poverty caused terrorism, then poor people the world over—rice farmers in China, untouchables in India, non-flat screen TV owners in the U.S.—would be rising up en masse to wreak havoc in hijackings and suicide bombings.

(2) It’s not post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or any garden-variety psychological malady.  If it were, we would expect suicide bombings from Vietnam vets, or from the New York Times staff after the public option was dropped from the health care bill.

(3) It’s not whether we’re currently at war with the place where the individual resides.  I don’t recall any recent U.S. incursions into Nigeria, Arlington, or San Anselmo.

The most reliable factor in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies is: whether the individual adheres to an ideology that encourages engaging in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies.

Never mind that the ideology in question always happens to be Islamist.  At this point, even I would be fine with overlooking this fact if we would just do something about these threats when they surface.

If the warning signs sent by would-be terrorists were densely coded and difficult to decipher, delayed action by our national security officials might be understandable.  But a PowerPoint presentation urging Muslims to cut off the heads of infidels and pour burning oil down their throats is not subtle.

Nidal Hasan delivered a now-infamous lecture to an auditorium of army psychiatrists in which he imparted charming Koranic admonishments for the nonbeliever such as “Seize him and drag him in the midst of the blazing fire.  Then pour over his head the torment of boiling water” and “We shall burn them in fire.  As often as their skins are roasted through, we shall change them for other skins that they may taste the punishment.”  This is not exactly the Venona cables.

Abdulmutallab’s high school teacher reported that, when he wasn’t busy captaining the water polo team, he repeatedly defended the Taliban’s tactics in classroom discussions and endorsed the 9/11 attacks.  Abdulmutallab disappeared in October, cut off ties with his family, and moved to Yemen to learn Arabic, all of which prompted his father to call the American Embassy in Nigeria to warn that Umar was a likely threat to the U.S.

John Walker Lindh began studying Islam in high school and converted when he was 16, moved to Yemen to study at a madrassa when he was 19, and wrote his family letters, not asking for money, but praising the bombing of the USS Cole by Sudan-funded terrorists.

Yet regarding the motivations of these attackers, the current Democratic administration warns us not to jump to any conclusions, or at least any that might interfere with the bestowal of glory upon Allah.  I can sooner conceive of stubborn liberals going after Nigerian bankers as a suspect class before I can imagine them pointing the finger at Islamists.

If we can throw an American in jail for joking that he’d like to shoot the president, can we please add a militant, well-funded Islamist with terrorist connections to the crummy no-fly list?

Warning: Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, and Balloon Boy are nowhere to be found in this list!

1. Iran Election Upheaval – Brave protestors took to the streets of Tehran and Twittered to the world shocking pictures and videos of civilian beatings and shootings by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, despite the inability of our Commander-in-Chief to raise an eyebrow over the carnage for a week.  As “President” Ahmadinejad continues to mock the West’s demands that Iran halt its uranium enrichment, the outrage of the emboldened and mobilized protest movement has the potentially farthest-reaching consequences of any event in 2009.

2. Health Care Reform Debate – Simultaneously the most outrageous and boring story of 2009.  On the one hand, we listened all year in disbelief as conservative think tanks unearthed fresh horrors in evolving versions of the bill; on the other hand, we listened to Democrats recite tired lies about “45 million uninsured” and “bending the cost curve” and “Nancy Pelosi approving a surtax on Botox.”  As Obama supporter Camille Paglia admitted, “By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers.”

3. Climategate – In which more pages of e-mails and computer code than in all the healthcare reform bills combined were leaked to the press, revealing climate “scientists” fudging data, threatening to delete data, and doing everything but counting pregnant chads to make the results come out the way they wanted.  Here’s a deal for Michael Mann, author of the discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature over the past few millennia: if “trick,” “hide,” and “decline” no longer mean what they once did, then neither do “dire,” “peer-reviewed,” or “consensus.”

4. Afghanistan Surge – General McChrystal begged President Obama in private and in public to give him the troops he needed to implement the counterinsurgency strategy Obama had hired him to carry out back in March.  After four months of dawdling, Obama gave McChrystal 75% of his revised request—which was 50% of his initial request—with no rationale provided for his bargain basement offer.  If this is how Obama treats the “good war,” I’d hate to see what he does to the bad one.

5. Tea Party Movement – Rasmussen released a poll in December showing that in a three-way generic race among Democratic, Republican, and Tea Party candidates, the Tea Party contender would beat the Republican by 5 points.  Despite the left’s ludicrous charges of racism and desperate use of lewd sexual terms never adopted by any Tea Party patriot, the biggest mass uprising against government spending and abuse of power since 1773 grew angrier and more forceful as the year went on, and will only be further inflamed by the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of the health care spending act.

6. Stimulus Bill Passage – It would give you a concussion if it fell on you, even if dropped by Obama at the nadir of his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia or the Emperor of Japan.  Four months after its urgently required, life-or-death passage, only 5% of stimulus funds had been spent, a detail the administration papered over by simply lying about funded projects.  Naturally, this summer Democrats began clamoring for another stimulus package.

7. Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation – Proof that Democrats were never the party against racism—they were once the party that supported racism, and now they’re the party that supports reverse racism.  If Our Wise Latina’s speeches on biological differences between the races had been half as incendiary, the media would be consoling us that she might have been rejected for the Supreme Court if what she had said had been any worse; yet the fact is, if her words had been twice as offensive, wimpy Republicans in Congress would probably still have voted to confirm her.

8. Ft. Hood Shootings – The first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, which was allowed to happen for the same reason as 9/11—the politically correct refusal to identify the danger of Islamism and its adherents’ wish to obliterate us and our allies for promoting freedom.  The most damning detail was Major Nidal Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation to a group of army scientists on the Koran’s injunction to decapitate infidels—to which the army responded by giving Hasan a promotion in Texas to get him out of their hair.

9. Pakistan Helps the U.S. Fight the Taliban – The Pakistan Army finally stepped up to the plate, no thanks to Obama’s dithering over the U.S.’s own commitment in the region.  Pakistan began Operation Path to Deliverance, in which they managed to send the same number of troops Obama finally agreed to as part of General McChrystal’s surge (30,000) to South Waziristan to beat back insurgents.

10. New Jersey/Virginia Gubernatorial Elections – Last year, liberals hooted that Republican primary candidates were avoiding George W. Bush like the plague, but the joke’s on them—their messiah is turning into the kiss of death in just his first year of office.  Obama’s multiple campaign stops for would-be governors Corzine and Deeds did nothing to assist them, and possibly even hindered their candidacies.