Root Causes Indeed !

Well, I guess another misguided liberal theory about the root causes of terrorism has been smashed (remember land for peace?)....now we can throw the "poverty" excuse out the window as well - from Western Resistance:

More details have emerged about the raids which happened overnight at addresses in Birmingham, High Wycombe and east London, connected with a plot to blow up transatlantic planes. The Times states that 13 raids took place in all, and 24 people were apprehended.

At least four people were arrested in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire a commuter town to the west of London, though the number may now be five. One of those detained was a son of a former worker for the Tory party.
Half a mile away in Micklefield Road, two more houses were raided, and friends said of one of the men taken away that he had become interested in radical Islam following a trip to Pakistan two years ago. In his late 20s, this individual was thought to have been an international dealer in sports cars.
The Guardian states that one of the men arrested at High Wycombe had been a convert to Islam, whose name is Don Stewart-Whyte.

In Birmingham, states the Telegraph, a business property in Belcher's Lane, Bordersley Green, was raided. A semi-detached house in St Margaret's road, was simultaneously searched. This house has a small Islamic school in its back garden.

Mostly middle class, by anyone's reckoning. No oppressed youths here, no victims of discrimination or poverty. Just a lot of pure, unadulterated hatred from a religion that seems to feel that blinding violence is the way to bring about a change in the policy of a democratically elected government - via Gateway Pundit:

In a bold and shocking move, Islamic leaders in Great Britain wrote the Prime Minister blaming the the Blair government for putting British lives at increased risk!

The letter says:
"As British Muslims we urge you to do more to fight against all those who target civilians with violence, whenever and wherever that happens. It is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the U.K. and abroad."
To combat terror the government has focused extensively on domestic legislation. While some of this will have an impact, the government must not ignore the role of its foreign policy.

Labor member of Parliament (representing Tooting) Sadiq Khan added:
"Current policy on the Middle East is seen by almost everyone I speak to as unfair and unjust. Such a sense of injustice plays into the hands of extremists."

So it seems as if the Muslims of Great Britian are issuing a not-so-veiled threat: Change your Middle East policies, or you'll see more terrorism at home. Well, at least they are being somewhat honest, and not claiming that the poverty of Muslims worldwide is the root cause of terrorism. Instead, they jump upon the civilian casualities bandwagon, not mentioning of course that the smashed plot to blow up a dozen passanger airliners (full of civilians, of course) was hatched well before the current Middle Eastern hostilities erupted.

So let's recoup what we have learned: Poverty is not a root cause of terror, nor is Israeli "occupation" of Arab lands. It is a tool used by radical Islam to force democratic Western governments in policy changes that suit their agenda.

I'll go further, and infer that multiculturalism is also a failure (and more than partially to blame), as its "all cultures are equal" meme allows immigrant communities to remain isolated and unable to obtain a stake in their new home country's social and economic fabric. This liberal-enforced segregation allows conspiracies and plots to grow, and flourish...

But I'll give the final word to an op-ed piece in today's Washington Post, from Harvard lecturer Juliette Kayyem, who proves that Ivy League intellectuals are surpassed by no one in sticking their heads into the sand in the face of truth and factual evidence that does not fit their theories:

While many Americans may have an inferiority complex about things British -- the refinement, the style and, of course, those accents -- it would be a mistake to carry it over to the area of counterterrorism.

Americans with an inferiority complex??? British counterterrorism efforts, which just saved almost four thousand lives, a mistake? Maybe on Planet Harvard...

This week, soon after authorities in London announced the arrests of a group of people allegedly plotting to bomb a number of airliners, commentators and experts were marveling at how the British disrupted the attack and asking whether we needed to be more like them, with their less restrictive surveillance laws, a domestic intelligence agency, almost no rules against watching and tracking Muslims in mosques or community centers, and no First Amendment. But those would be the very lessons we ought not to learn from this week's events...

Miss Kayyem would be more pleased, no doubt, if the airline attack had succeeded...she could have written instead about poverty and social injustices as the root causes, and such. Well, she'll fight the war her way, writing op-ed pieces telling us our successes are somehow failures...

Problem for her is, there are fewer and fewer that are falling for this tourtured line of thinking...