Barack H. Obama Believes The US Is Responsible For Islamic Jihad

Robert Spencer writes an interesting article on the interview that Barack Obama recently gave to Fareed Zakaria on Sunday CNN.  During the interview, Obama basically blamed the US for Islamic jihad.

Spencer points out that Obama seems to believe that in addition to US policy, poverty causes Islamic jihad.  This is a failure to grasp what is really going on.  The 9/11 hijackers were mostly well-educated middle-class Saudis.  Osama bin Laden is from one of the richest families in the Middle East.  Palestinian terrorists are more likely to be middle class than poor.  Harvard professor Albert Abadie, who studies terrorism, finds no data to connect poverty to terrorism:

Terrorism is simply the result of the resurgence of Islamic supremacist ideology.  The driving force is the belief that non-Muslim legal systems must be replaced with Islamic Sharia law.  Nevertheless, Senator Barack Obama believes Islamofascism is connected to the failure of the West to make sure “there’s bottom-up economic growth” in Muslim countries.

Obama recommends that we reduce terrorist recruits by “engaging the Islamic world” and understanding it.  He sounds like he believes all we need to do is apply a therapeutic model and after a few sessions of counseling we will all be holding hands.  It is not, however, that kind of conflict.  It is an ideological conflict of worldviews that are incompatible and one side is willing to violently enforce its will upon the other.