Last year’s release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century catapulted Thomas Piketty to international stardom. In the 700-page tome, the French economist argued that inequality is a grave social evil and capitalism is the root of all inequality. Now he’s added a spurious spin to his thesis: inequality is responsible for the rise of ISIS. As the Washington Post reports, Piketty asserts in a recent Le Monde column that “Inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month—and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.” Piketty’s supposedly revelatory argument is symptomatic of the materialist mindset that transfixes the Western elite and thus leaves the West vulnerable to—and hapless against—the global jihad.
Piketty claims that Middle Eastern wealth, concentrated among several oil monarchies governing small populations in “semi-slavery,” has created conditions ripe for jihadism. In Piketty’s reading of history, the West is responsible for driving oil “to the emirs” through military interventions such as the first Gulf War, and then backing such petro-regimes “militarily and politically.” The Obama administration was derided earlier this year for promoting what critics called “jobs for jihadis” as a means of tackling the “root causes” of terrorism. But while poor economic conditions may typify Europe’s most fertile jihadist breeding grounds, poverty in itself isn’t the cause of jihadism. Throughout history, billions of people have lived in squalor without strapping on suicide bombs or taking up arms against “the infidel.” Wealthy Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia have financed jihadist groups, and Osama bin Laden was born to a wealthy family.
