Monday, July 2

HUMAN CAPITAL AND THE S UPPLY OF HOME-GROWN IS LAMIC TERRORIS TS IN THE UK

One of my friends passed this paper across to me. I am constantly surprised at the usual image of terrorists being from poor families. No, I am afraid not. People who want to commit violence for a political or religious reason are NOT poor or illiterate, you need to be fairly smart to get over the usual threshold of violence, be able to rationalise violence and be intelligent enough to understand that you need to do extraordinary stuff to get out of the way of the law.

Here in the UK, a comparison was done between UK Muslims and UK Muslims convicted of terrorist offences (77). To no surprise, they find that the terrorists are significantly higher educated than the usual population. Curiously and strangely, there is also a statistical significance if you are male, unemployed, married and UK citizen. Go figure. A facetious comment was that your wife is going to make your life so difficult at home when you are unemployed that you take up terrorism? Also, curiously, “

Ethnic origin is also a statistically significant predictor of being convicted, with this most likely if
UK Muslims are of African and mixed Southeast Asia-White ethnic origin

Hmmm, not sure what one can say about this. But one should keep a beady eye out on those universities.

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