Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday drew a link between extremism and lack of opportunity in the Middle East, telling students in the region that suicide bombers are driven by a feeling they have more to gain in the afterlife than now.
The former president hushed a packed basketball stadium at the American University in Dubai when he asked, rhetorically: "What leads people to blow themselves up?"
Answering his own question, Clinton said: "They believe they have more to gain in the next world than this one."
Huh? Don't all believers ultimately believe that the rewards of the afterlife are far better than this world's?
And even if lack of opportunity leads many young Moslems to downgrade their worldly options to look to the afterlife, this hardly answers the question of why these afterlife seekers make great efforts to take as many infidels down with them.
I mean, plenty of people in central Africa have probably far more reason to despair of their fate in the world and look to the afterlife for a reason to have hope. But how many of them are going down in a blaze of religious glory parked outside a luxury hotel?
So even if we solve the problems of opportunity, not all will succeed any more than all succeed in the West. How do we solve the problem of believing that mass murder is the appropriate response to lack of opportunity?
President Clinton's view on the causes and cures of suicide bombings is nonsense.
