Leftists like to excuse violence by asserting that its cause is poverty. That this is easily disproven by a simple glance back at crime rates during the Depression matters not one whit to them. Still, they assert this because — wait for it — that’s what they would do if they were poor. Meanwhile, in the real world of modern Muslim terrorism, guess who tends to be behind it:
Bangladesh’s capital city reeled in shock on Sunday as clues began to flood social media about the privileged backgrounds of the half-dozen attackers believed to have butchered 20 patrons of a restaurant during a bloody siege here late last week. The six attackers were killed when the army stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery to end an 11-hour siege early Saturday.
The police declined to name the young men because nobody had shown up as of Sunday night to identify their bodies, but friends and relatives recognized photographs that were posted on a messaging app by the Islamic State, along with praise for the violence. The men, all in their late teens or early 20s, were products of Bangladesh’s elite, several having attended one of the country’s top English-medium private schools as well as universities both in the country and abroad. Among them was the son of a former city leader in the prime minister’s own Awami League, the governing party.
“That’s what we’re absolutely riveted by,” said Kazi Anis Ahmed, a writer and publisher of the daily newspaper The Dhaka Tribune. “That these kids from very affluent families with no material want can still be turned to this kind of ideology, motivated not just to the point of killing but also want to be killed.”
As in so much else, Islam offers the flip side of the anomie that grips western criminals. In the West, they believe in nothing, having had God, religion, decency, responsibility and everything good beaten out of them in the Devil’s Pleasure Palace of “progressive” culture. In Islam, it’s the very emptiness of western culture that drives these pampered pansies into the arms of a strong, pseudo-masculine religion like Islam, which justifies their adolescent impulses (fight, screw, eat, sleep, repeat) with a “holy” patina.
That children of the country’s upper classes appear to have joined militant Islamists in an act of such brutality highlighted the radicalization among the largely moderate Muslim population here, a process that has accelerated in recent years. The attackers intended to kill foreigners, whom they shot and then hacked with sharp weapons, blaming them for hampering the progress of Islam, one of the hostages later said.
The involvement of the Islamic State appeared increasingly more likely during the latest attack, with the organization not only claiming responsibility but later posting the photographs of the men believed to have carried it out.
Absent a universal reformation of Islam to bring its tenets into the 21st century (which will never happen), the only way to solve this burgeoning problem is to disabuse the passive but supportive Muslim populace of these delusions — by any means necessary, as the Left likes to say.
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