Shalom All:

I share this article because the cause given for terrorist violence is always
connected with poverty.  The arguement goes if people were not poor they
would not turn to violence.  Therefore the "haves" must give to the
"have-nots" and there will be peace.  This man debunks that arguement.

Freedom squelches terrorist violence
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.04/05-terror.html
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Before analyzing the data, Abadie (Associate Professor of Public Policy)
believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in
poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors.
However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors
studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation's
wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences.

"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and
poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true
not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have
shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism,
both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.

Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of
political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though
terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it
was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.
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Dianne
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