Islamic terrorism is not caused by poverty and oppression

There's a major misconception about Islam and Muslim terrorism:

Islamic extremists and violence have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with poverty and "oppression", quite the opposite!

Wealth and education do NOT reduce Islamic extremism, they make it worse!

I had a debate about education and Islam with a very nice couple in Amritsar during a Sikh wedding. They were both doctors, so highly educated, and atheists. They had recently read Dawkin's book "The God Delusion", so we had a starting point. Both had family in Pakistan and were well aware of the extremism in that country. The husband attributed it to a lack of education - he believed that more education would improve things. His wife and I totally disagreed. We were both aware of the fact that the most educated Muslims tend to be way more extremists.

A Foreign Affairs study confirmed what we said a bit later - in Pakistan, extremists are not poor, they are from the middle and upper class:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67976/graeme-blair-c-christine-fair-neil-malhotra-jacob-n-shapiro/pakistans-middle-class-extremists  

Remember that student who was killed over "blasphemy" on his university campus? His killers were all co-students. Highly educated.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39593302

Overall, it is unquestionable that:

• the worst Islamic extremists tend to be educated; they are the ones who read more Islamic texts and the more they read, the more extremist they become (unless they stop believing, which does happen)
• 2 of the Sri Lanka terrorists in 2019 were sons of the richest billionaire on the island; they had both studied in western universities
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/world/asia/sri-lanka-bombers-millionaire.html
• 4 doctors, 2 each in the UK and Australia, launched synchronized, though very ineffective, terrorist attacks on airports just after the cartoon riots; they all held good jobs and were considered "fully integrated"
• many Islamic terrorists, including 9/11 terrorists and ISIS supporters, had engineering degrees
• the underwear bomber was the son of a former minister from Nigeria who had been radicalized while he studied at a university in London (it is worth mentioning that it was his own father who denounced him to the police, as he was worried about the radicalization of his son)
• a poll in the UK from 2009 showed that 49% of all British Muslims wanted to live under Sharia law, but among university students, it was 75%
• at a major university in France, an election  of student representatives shocked observers as almost all Muslim students had voted en bloc for an extremist group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which gave them about 20% of the total student council vote
• we had an assistant professor for Physics at EPFL (my alma mater) and CERN trying to help Al Qaeda
  https://www.letemps.ch/suisse/condamne-france-un-physicien-lepfl-ne-pourra-revenir-suisse
• the very wealthy owner of the "Bridges" TV station in NYC who claimed that he wanted to "educate people about the peaceful nature of Islam" punished his wife for trying to divorce him by cutting off her head; as is typical for "honor" killings, he called the police himself and waited for their arrival; "honor" killers are proud about their deed, they do not try to hide it
  https://www.foxnews.com/story/muslim-television-channel-founder-charged-with-beheading-his-wife

As this German study from the Social Sciences University of Berlin found in 2014, Islamic fundamentalism is extremely prevalent - they estimated that about 66% of all Muslims in Europe have to be considered as "fundamentalists", i.e. they follow a literal interpretation of the Quran and place Islam above any constitution or legal framework in western countries. It is much worse among the migrants who arrived since 2015:

https://www.wzb.eu/en/press-release/islamic-fundamentalism-is-widely-spread

My former girlfriend until last year is an ex-Muslim whose family moved to Canada from Pakistan. She grew up in Toronto and she told me that she was taught to hate non-Muslims in school, at home and at the mosque, that we are filthy, stupid and evil. She was a good hijabi until she read more Islamic texts and her then-boyfriend (an ex-Muslim) educated her about the true nature of Islam.

There have been quite significant problems in Canada with Islam, including shootings and terrorist attacks, but they are being downplayed. Trudeau backs Islamic immigration and explicitly sides with extremists. He handed $10 million to a terrorist, as you probably remember. He condemned "Islamophobia" on TV when a Muslim girl falsely claimed to have had her hijab pulled off by a "anti-Muslim extremist", but he said nothing when a non-Muslim woman was publicly attacked by a Muslim woman who threw hot coffee in her face - which just illustrates the hypocrisy of the Trudeau's attitude, which leads me to wonder if he is a convert to Islam.

As this Pakistani ex-Muslim Atheist explains - and I'm really surprised that Huffington Post published his very well written essay - the root cause of Islamic extremism is Islam - it never changed; all that "extremism" is just normal Islam as it has been practiced for the last 1300 years:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/an-atheist-muslims-perspective-on-the-root-causes-of-islamist-jihadism-and-the-politics-of-islamophobia_b_3159286.html

Another friend, Aquila, wrote a book about her life as Muslim woman in Algeria from her birth until she finally emigrated to France at the age of 32. The title is "For a world without Islam" (Pour un monde sans Islam):

https://www.amazon.fr/Pour-monde-sans-islam-Aquila/dp/2371530301/

She left Europe before the book was published, as she knew that Muslims would try to murder her.

There are some very nice Muslims I met who do NOT want to be extremists and who try to find peaceful interpretations of Islam. It pains me to think that they will be the first ones to be targeted by the extremists when they take over (if we let them), as heretics are always worse than non-believers.

One of my former debate opponents on Orkut - now a good friends - a Pakistani ex-Muslim who used to be communist and Muslim fundamentalist until a few years after our debates, the oppression against non-Muslims and ex-Muslims got much worse in Pakistan because of western "tolerance". Muslims interpreted this as weakness.

It is a hard to accept this fact, but tolerance, in most cultures, is seen as a sign that the enemy is weak and stupid and they take it as an invitation to kick those who extend their hand.

Such cultures only respect a display of strength. That is why Obama did not get any respect from Muslims, while president Trump got them to the negotiation table by refusing to back down, which led to 5 epic, historic peace treaties between Serbia and Bosnia (a Muslim country) as well as Israel and Sudan, the Emirates, Qatar and Morocco! Most people do not realize what an achievement this represents and what immense respect they must have had for Trump.

One person who understood this very well and who radically changed his views on Trump from never-Trumper to Trump supporter is Prof. Daniel Pipes, one of the greatest experts on the Middle East:

http://www.danielpipes.org/19529/a-reluctant-but-unhesitating-vote-for-donald-trump

Kudos to Prof. Pipes, it is never easy to publicly admit a change of heart, as that also implies an admission that one had been wrong before.

Anyway, this very difficult debate must continue and it will only get harder as the number of Muslims in western countries increases and their arrogance and violence along with their perception of their own power. This brand new article from Germany illustrates to perfection how shamefully naive western people really are. A well-known representative of an Islamic association in Göttingen, Germany, who had been viewed as tolerant and a promoter of the "inter-religious dialogue" had posted antisemitic, anti-Armenian and anti-Christian hate mongering messages on social media:

https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article227430017/Ditib-Nach-aussen-liberal-auftretend-nach-innen-grob-antisemitisch.html?cid=socialmedia.facebook.shared.web

Unfortunately, this article itself persists in assuming that he is just an "extremist". Based on the WZB study, that makes him representative for at least 2/3rds of all Muslims in Europe.

So what now?