The Terrorist Investor Class

Shawn Macomber, writing for American Spectator, points us to a book that should be on the must-read list of everyone concerned with the war on terror. Rachel Ehrenfeld's Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It led him to these thoughts:

TERRORISM REQUIRES MANY things: blind adherence to a destructive ideology; disregard for human life; charismatic leadership skills. But above all it takes cash. There is a reason why Osama Bin Laden is the CEO of worldwide jihad: his oversized bank account. Following the example of Bin Laden and the Saudi jihad exporters, terrorists have in effect become an investor class.

They open pizza shops, bakeries, car washes, and other legitimate businesses to raise perfectly clean money and launder the dirty stuff. They found charities, tugging at the heartstrings of good people, and then funnel the cash to radical Islamists. They take advantage of people's addictions and the large profits available in the international drug trade. "We are making these drugs for Satan America and the Jews," states an official Hezbollah fatwa justifying Muslim involvement in the drug trade. "If we cannot kill them with guns, so we will kill them with drugs." Often as not, the drug money helps buys guns and they get to do both.

There is much more to his article, and I'll be picking the book up this coming weekend.

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Posted by zombyboy at March 21, 2004 06:30 PM | TrackBack