In the aftermath of September 11, most scholars, journalists, and other writers repeated the long-established argument that Islamic anger at the West is a product of Western oppression of Muslims. Time magazine proclaims that “terrorism is the bitter howl of the victimized.”

The victimized terrorists are variously thought to be directing their anger against Western-induced poverty; the Western-supported rise of Israel; or the Western imperialism that displaced the Ottoman Empire.

Many writers cite the unarguably tragic fate of Palestinian refugees after the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948 as the motive for acts of terrorism against civilians in Israel and elsewhere, including New York and Washington. And Islamic extremism is alleged to be a product of poverty and hopelessness in the Arab world, which are in turn blamed on U.S. hegemony and capitalist globalization. Similarly, opponents of the war in Iraq told us that military action to remove Saddam Hussein would further aggravate Arab and Muslim frustrations, spawning more suicide terror.

However, certain persistent facts undermine these claims. To begin with, no Palestinians participated in the attacks of September 11. Apart from the ideological godfather of Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzamm, who was killed in Pakistan in 1989, few people from Palestine or Jordan have joined al-Qaida. And Azzam himself turned to “Islamist” extremism in disgust with the Marxist, class-driven ideology of Yasir Arafat, al- Fatah, and the Palestine Liberation Organization.[...]