So much for poverty causing 'terrorism' as the left likes to claim.

A better case can be made for wealth and radicalism causing terrorism, given the latest revelations from Sri Lanka that its monstrous suicide bombers, who killed 359 mostly poor people in their churches this past Easter Sunday, were the cossetted children of the country's elites.

What a putrid picture.

ZeroHedge has a report, largely citing the reporting in the New York Times:

Sri Lankan police have determined that two of the eight suicide bombers who carried out the Easter Sunday bombings, one of the deadliest terror attacks in recent memory, were the sons of one of the wealthiest businessmen in the country - a spice trader whose family lived in what the New York Times described as a "beautiful white villa" just outside of the capital, Colombo.

The spice trader, Mohammad Yusuf Ibrahim, built his fortune on black pepper, white pepper, nutmeg, cloves and vanilla. He was even celebrated by Sri Lanka's former president for his "outstanding service to the nation." But that didn't stop two of his sons from joining a jihadist group and pledging their allegiance to ISIS.

Here are some Times details:

Sri Lankan officials have been reluctant to identify the suicide bombers, saying that could hamper their investigation.
But at a news conference on Wednesday, Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s minister of defense, said most of the bombers had been well educated and had come from middle-class or upper-class families.

"Financially they are quite independent and their families are stable financially. So that is a worrying fact," he said. "Some of them have studied in various other countries. They hold degrees, LLMs. They are quite well-educated people."

Nope, not poor people. But it was very much poor people who were their victims, despite the press coverage about a prominent Danish billionaire also losing three of his four children in the horrible attack. If you've ever been to Sri Lanka, you will know that the Sri Lankans who become Christians are largely from the ranks of the poor, escaping ethnic and class barriers. The multi-pronged attack Sunday was a grotesque reversal of the usual class warfare narrative put out there by the left, in that it was the rich kids, preening around with guns in their social media photos, who inflicted the vilest of harm on the poor.

It's also consistent with what Sri Lanka knew about ISIS recruits from among their national whom they'd caught earlier -- that the were the idle children of the rich. I noted that here.

CNN has a good laundry list of previous Islamist terrorists who came from wealthy backgrounds:

Some of the most notorious terrorists of the modern era have been some of the most privileged people on the planet.

Osama bin Laden was the son of a Saudi construction magnate.

 

His successor as the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, is a surgeon from a prominent Egyptian family.

 

The underwear bomber was directed on his mission by Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born son of a Yemeni cabinet minister who was studying for his PhD at George Washington University before he joined al Qaeda in Yemen.

 

The notorious ISIS terrorist "Jihadi John" -- Mohammed Emwazi -- who was responsible for the beheading of American journalist James Foley in 2014, was from "a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming," according to the Washington Post.

 

The lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, was the son of an Egyptian lawyer and was studying for a doctorate from a German university.

There are many other examples, but you get the point.

 

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called "underwear bomber" who tried to blow up an American passenger jet over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker and was attending University College London, one of the top universities in the world, when he tried unsuccessfully to blow up Northwest Flight 253 with a bomb secreted in his underwear.

The writer noted that terrorism experts say terrorism really is 'a bourgeois phenomenon.' 

Which signals that the pattern is holding and the left's narrative about poverty and terrorism is garbage.

The anarchist and leftist terrorists of late 19th century and early 20th century tsarist Russia had this background - read Joseph Conrad's 'The Secret Agent' or 'Under Western Eyes.'

But more prominently for us, so did the U.S., during the late 1960s, when rich terrorists such as Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, unleashed terror on America's poor and working class in the name of championing them, dancing around with guns and good looking chicks in mini-skirts for the cameras after each outrage, putting on the berets, and preening for the press, saying only the most outrageous of offensive things, celebrating Charles Manson. It was all so very fun for Ayers and his fellow rich radicals in that inner circle. Then the rich punk, who was the son of the Commonwealth Edison CEO, got off scot-free after he was caught, walking out of a courthouse "guilty as sin, free as a bird," as he put it, and after that, he went on to radicalize the Illinois school system and mentor the young Barack Obama.

Sri Lanka's archishop of Colombo has called on the Islamist radicalized terrorists who blew up the churches to be punished without mercy, and declared them 'animals.' Given the U.S. history of Ayers, it's quite possible he knows what will otherwise happen if the authorities don't stomp this out harshly and fast. Ayers went on to spread his radicalism through the 'long march through the institutions' as the Gramsciian lefties say, leaving considerable rubble in its wake. And he told the New York Times, in a famous interview that ran on 9/11, that he wasn't ashamed of his bombings and didn't think he'd done enough. He certainly wasn't sorry. 

It's not far-fetched to think a similar pattern could happen in Sri Lanka, now that the intellectual rot has begun among the rich. These phenomenon often do happen in periods of rising prosperity - in the U.S., in tsarist Russia, and certainly Sri Lanka, which has seen a considerable rise in its standard of living with the end of its inter-ethnic civil war several years ago. Authorities there say they still think a lot of these rich elites gone bad are still out there.

A far stronger statement from Pope Francis, the supposed champion of the poor, and a far stronger response from Sri Lankan authorities to put these miscreants down would seem to be in order, even as doing so will force them to come into conflict with the country's moneyed rich. 

They need to do it anyway, and the history of Ayers is exactly the reason why.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons public domain