SILLY TERRORIST MOTIVATION THEORY... TUTU IS DUMB
As My Mother Says, "Low Intelligence, Dear"

Again from Taranto:

South Africa's Jerry Falwell
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, was in America last week, where he made the rounds of the cable talk shows. We caught him on MSNBC's "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, and while he was once a leader in a worthy cause, his views on the threats facing the world today are utterly fatuous. He denounced not only the liberation of Iraq but the liberation of Afghanistan, and he espoused a novel theory as to what motivates the terrorists of al Qaeda:

Tutu: It is quite crucial for us to want to look at what are the root causes that enable or make people be ready to engage in desperate acts.

Matthews: What do you think they are?

Tutu: Well, I believe myself that there's no way in which we are likely to win the war against terrorism, as long as you've got conditions of poverty, of disease, of ignorance that can make people so desperate that they believe the only options they have are to engage in acts of that kind.

Matthews: But the people who struck us on September 11 were people who were reasonably well educated. They were technical people. Maybe they didn't have Ph.D.s, but they had educations that would have allowed them to make a living quite well in the Western world.

Tutu: Now, the point is, if precisely people of that sort who look at the inequities of the international economic order--I mean, to think just now that you say to the developing world, in order for you to make it, produce more. So you sell. And they do produce more.

But then the developed world has massive, massive agricultural subsidies that ensure that farmers in those rich countries can produce their stuff cheaply. And there are high tariffs that prevent the developing country from being able to sell their goods. And so you say, these guys are playing a game and they make the rules for the game and they are the referees in this games. It is so lopsided that anyone seeking to be a normal person realizes that the odds are stacked against us so horrendously that people will say, I am ready to do anything to get out of this trap.

We sympathize with Tutu's criticism of Western trade policies, but if he thinks Osama bin Laden and his followers are agitating for free trade, he's nuts. It's reminiscent of Jerry Falwell's comment just after Sept. 11 that the attack was the fault of "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way," or George McGovern's suggestion in a December 2002 article that terrorists are angry at America for not adopting a McGovernite foreign policy.

After McGovern's article appeared, we dubbed this "vicarious terrorism": people who should know better claiming that if only we embrace their pet cause, it will appease the enemies of civilization. Falwell at least had the decency to apologize for his remarks. We're not holding our breath waiting for McGovern and Tutu to do the same.