The American Jewish community was shocked by the news that two Jewish customers speaking Hebrew outside a restaurant in northern California last week were attacked and beaten by three men who happened to be walking by.
Then came the second shocker: one of the attackers was not a teenage miscreant but a 32 year-old attorney, employed by a local law firm as a specialist in mergers and acquisitions.
Once again, the old stereotype about violent anti-Semites and other terrorists—that they are young, unemployed and turn to extremism because they have “nothing to lose”—is contradicted by what we actually discover about them.
Barack Obama was a prominent exponent of the notion that poverty is a prime cause of terrorism. As a state senator in Illinois in 2001, Obama wrote that the 9/11 terrorists’ “lack of empathy” for their victims came “out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” As president, in 2015, Obama asserted that terrorism increases “when people are not able to make a living or take care of their families.”
Obama was not alone in making such assumptions. Just last week, a prominent Israeli journalist, Tzvi Gottlieb, claimed that Hezbollah is actually just “an employment problem,” and if Israel would pay the salaries of its 50,000 members—which he estimated at $420 million annually—they would gladly put down their guns.
Yet the details emerging about recent Islamist attacks in New York, Virginia and Michigan contradict the notion that terrorists are simply unemployed people looking for jobs who don’t actually believe in the cause they espouse.
Emir Balat, who hurled a bomb at protesters near Gracie Mansion, ran lucrative online businesses selling high-end footwear and construction supplies. Mohamed Jalloh, who murdered a professor in Virginia, was 36 and served in the state’s national guard. Ayman Ghazali, who rammed his car into a Michigan synagogue, was a 41 year-old father of two with a job and a house. All three of them had plenty to lose by becoming terrorists.
A series of studies in the 1990s and early 2000s pulled the rug out from under the theory that terrorists are uneducated and unemployed, starting with a demographic analysis of the 415 Hamas terrorists deported by Israel to Lebanon in 1992. Dozens of them were doctors or professors; three-fourths were married; many had five or more children.
A study of 250 Palestinian Arabs who trained for suicide bombings in the late 1990s found that “none of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs…Two were the sons of millionaires.” Similarly, two-thirds of the 9/11 hijackers had attended college, some had master’s degrees and most had professions.
Contrary to the recent claim by Tzvi Gottlieb about Hezbollah, a study of its members in 2002 concluded that “having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary school or higher education is positively associated with participation in Hezbollah.”
Radical ideology, not poverty, is the main cause of terrorism. That was true during the Holocaust—a large majority of top SS officers were university-educated professionals, and many had doctorates—just as it is true of contemporary Islamist and Palestinian Arab terrorists. ●

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