Some people will resort to anything to avoid looking squarely at the implications of the Islamic jihad ideology. Watch this space for next week’s feature, “Chicken Salad Causes Jihad.”
“Climate change seen fanning conflict and terrorism,” by Mark Trevelyan for Reuters, with thanks to Paul:
LONDON (Reuters) – Global warming could exacerbate the world’s rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday.
If poverty causes jihad, why isn’t Haiti teeming with suicide bombers?
“We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence,” Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain’s former ambassador to the United Nations, told a London conference on “Climate Change: the Global Security Impact.”
“Violence within and between communities and between nation states, we must accept, could possibly increase, because the precedents are all around.”
He cited Rwanda and Sudan’s Darfur region as two examples where drought and overpopulation, relative to scarce resources, had helped to fuel deadly conflicts.
Experts at the conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute said it was likely that global warming would create huge flows of refugees as people tried to escape areas swamped by rising sea levels or rendered uninhabitable by desertification.
Tickell said terrorists were likely to seek to exploit the tensions created.
“Those who are short of food, those who are short of water, those who can’t move to countries where it looks as if everything is marvelous are going to be people who are going to adopt desperate measures to try and make their point.”
Osama said it too:
BIN LADEN ON CLIMATE CHANGE
John Mitchell, chief scientist at Britain’s Met Office, noted al Qaeda had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.
“You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries,” al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden wrote in a 2002 “letter to the American people.”
Well, by all means we must redress all of bin Laden’s grievances. Then there will be peace. What’s that? Even if we give him everything he wants, the jihad ideology still mandates warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?