Poverty and unemployment among Arabs are fundamental reasons for the spread of terrorism, a Saudi prince said Sunday at the opening of a conference on small loans for the poor.
Well, guess what, we already have a thread at our forum in which we had a detailed discussion about the causes of terrorism along the same lines -
" Recruitment for Jihadi Organizations - Ideological compatability or economic pressure."
A lot of fellow guppies differed the idea/viewpoint but It seems like that arabic leaders are confirming the view point to some extent. I am also glad that the muslim world has finally started heading into the right direction with some serious introspection going on. And it is never too late…
Saudi Prince Suggests Causes for Terrorism
By FADI KHALIL
Associated Press Writer
October 10, 2004, 10:28 PM EDT
AMMAN, Jordan – Poverty and unemployment among Arabs are fundamental reasons for the spread of terrorism, a Saudi prince said Sunday at the opening of a conference on small loans for the poor.
The comments by Prince Talal bin Abdul-Aziz, brother of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, come as Arab leaders try to curb the spread of Islamic extremism throughout a region consumed by the American-led war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Unemployment creates one of the cornerstones of terrorism, and the poor who cannot get food on his table resorts to other means, which are involuntary human reactions,” the prince said while opening the four-day Middle East-Africa Microcredit Summit in Amman, Jordan’s capital.
Western officials have long urged Arab
governments to reform their societies and improve human rights records to remedy conditions believed capable of fostering terrorism.
Saudi Arabia, which terrorists have targeted in a series of attacks since last year, came under intense international pressure after the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States to reform its society and crack down on militants and their financial backers. Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 plane hijackers involved in the attacks were born in Saudi Arabia.
The government since has launched an aggressive crackdown on militants.
Sunday’s conference was organized by the Microcredit Summit Campaign, a Washington-based organization that tries to improve conditions in developing countries by facilitating loans to poverty-stricken communities.
The organization’s director, Sam Daley-Harris, said the conference aims to “highlight how the very poor can and are being reached with microcredit and will further highlight how large groups of poor people are moving out of poverty.”
Microcredit is a program of small loans and other financial services for the very poor that allows them to generate income. The loans can be as small as $20.
Daley-Harris said his organization launched a nine-year campaign in 1997 to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest families with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services.
Daley-Harris told The Associated Press that many of his organization’s female clients come from Muslim countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia. He said the program complied with Islamic practices banning interest rates offered for loans.
Jordan’s Queen Rania, an active campaigner for the organization, said microloans “support big ideas and means to abolish the obstacles which restrain the creative human soul and its will.”
Talal, one of the organization’s largest donors and president of the Arab Gulf Program for United Nations Development Organizations, promised to create an autonomous microcredit fund called the Arab World and African Microcredit Fund.
The fund, he said, will provide seed money and finance micro-enterprise developments throughout the Arab world and North Africa. He provided no further details.