Okay, I’ll Bite

The graph above, sampled from Leonid Bershidsky’s post at Bloomberg titled “To Defeat Islamic State, Treat Muslims Better”, caught my eye. For an interactive (and more informative) version go to the linked post.

Here’s a snippet of the accompanying text:

Thomas Piketty, probably the most fashionable economist since the 2008 financial crisis, has linked the phenomenon to the high income inequality in Middle Eastern nations, which he argued the West had helped foster by letting oil sheiks get rich and share little of their wealth.

Okay, I’ll bite. How might we have accomplished that?

First, I wonder who he means by “we”? Mostly “we” didn’t do anything other than buy oil from the legitimate, internationally recognized governments of Middle Eastern countries. And most of the “we” in that case were European countries.

We (meaning Americans) bought significantly more oil from Canada and Mexico than we did from any countries in the Middle East. Maybe it’s escaped my recollection but I don’t recall terrorist groups starting in Albert or the state of Campeche.

Should we have invaded the countries and overthrown their governments to ensure a better distribution of oil wealth? That would have gone over well.

I also should point out that “recruits per million population” is a meaningless statistic.

However, this makes sense:

Benmelech and Klor suggested a different explanation for recruitment success: It’s positively correlated with homogeneity in a society. The less ethnically diverse a society is, the more likely outsiders such as immigrants or second- or third generation Muslims are likely to turn to terror. The economists wrote of the Western European nations that supply a relatively high number of fighters:

“The more homogenous the host country is the greater difficulty immigrants such as Muslims from the Middle East experience in assimilating. As other research has shown, isolation induces some of them to become radicalized.”

and it’s what I’ve been saying for some time about Europe’s ethnic states.

But I’m not particularly comfortable with blaming the host countries, either. Have Muslims been treated so horribly in Sweden? Or are they merely a minority?

That’s the one thing which eludes a minority. They’re not a majority. When you’re accustomed to being in the majority and suddenly find yourselves very much in the minority, feeling out of place wouldn’t be particularly surprising. There’s a simple solution for that: go home.

The graph at the bottom of the page in the linked post is much better and tells a somewhat different story. However, it does raise an interesting question. Why does Finland produce so many terrorists compared to France?

Let me offer a very different explanation than the author does. It’s an artifact of Finland being such a small country and the recentness of its Muslim population. And the language. I’d be willing to bet that not one in a thousand of its Muslim immigrants speaks Finnish when they arrive. It’s a fairly tough language, more different from Arabic than English or French is, and practically useless outside of Finland.