Jihadi John: The bourgeois terrorist

Story highlights

Peter Bergen: Jihadi John ID'd as Mohammed Emwazi, a well-born Londoner with college degree

White House has said terrorism rooted in poverty; Bergen: Typically anti-west jihadists come from money, are educated

The ideology of ISIS and like-minded groups is rooted in Salafist ultra-fundamentalist interpretations of Islam

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and a vice president at New America. He is the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden – From 9/11 to Abbottabad.” This is an updated version of an article originally published February 19.

(CNN) —

This is how top national security reporters Souad Mekhennet and Adam Goldman of the Washington Post, who broke the story that Mohammed Emwazi has been identified as the notorious ISIS terrorist known as “Jihadi John,” describe him: “a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.”

They go on to say that Emwazi “was raised in a middle-class neighborhood in London” and attended the University of Westminster, which is a university in London that was founded in the early 19th century.

Emwazi poses something of a problem for the Obama administration’s narrative about who becomes a terrorist and why. Last week, the administration hosted a three-day conference on “Countering Violent Extremism,” which is a government euphemism for how best to deal with Islamist terrorism.

We heard from Obama administration officials and even the President himself that terrorism has something to do with lack of opportunities and poverty. Obama said that “we have to address grievances terrorists exploit, including economic grievances.”

He said, “when millions of people – especially youth – are impoverished and have no hope for the future, when corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns, resentments fester. The risk of instability and extremism grow. Where young people have no education, they are more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and radical ideas…”

Peter Bergen

PHOTO: Tim Hetherington for CNN

The President did acknowledge that terrorists can be rich like Osama bin Laden, who was the son of a Saudi construction magnate and attended the top high school and the best university in Saudi Arabia. It’s hard to imagine someone with more opportunities. Think the Trump family Saudi-style, minus the bling, and throw in a deep admiration for the Taliban.

But, in fact, Osama bin Laden is more the rule than the exception. Take not only Emwazi/Jihadi John, but also the notorious British terrorist, Omar Sheikh, who attended the London School of Economics and who kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.

Pearl was the first of al Qaeda’s victims to be beheaded. The terrorist who beheaded him was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who attended North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro and studied mechanical engineering.

Take Mohamed Atta, the son of an Egyptian lawyer, who had worked on a doctorate in, of all things, urban preservation at a German university and who led the 9/11 attacks. Or the present leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, a surgeon who comes from a leading Egyptian family that counts ambassadors, politicians and prominent clerics amongst its ranks.

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Report: Injustice, not unemployment, leads to extremism

Nearer to home we can also point to the Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was not only an officer in the U.S. Army and a psychiatrist, but is also from a comfortably middle-class family in Virginia.

Let’s also add to the mix Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up a bomb-laden SUV in Times Square on May 1, 2010. He had obtained an MBA in the United States and had worked as a financial analyst for the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics company. His father was one of the top officers in the Pakistani military.

These are not the dispossessed. They are the empowered.

“Who becomes a terrorist?” turns out, in many cases, to be much like asking, “Who owns a Volvo?”

Indeed, New America has studied the backgrounds of some 250 U.S.-based militants since 9/11 who have been indicted in or convicted of some kind of jihadist terrorist crime. They are on average middle class, reasonably well-educated family men with kids. They are, in short, ordinary Americans.

Similarly, in his important 2004 book “Understanding Terror Networks,” psychiatrist Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer, examined the backgrounds of 172 militants who were part of al Qaeda or a similar group. Just under half were professionals; two-thirds were either middle or upper class and had gone to college; indeed, several had doctorates.

In a 2006 study, Swati Pandey and this author examined the educational background of 79 terrorists responsible for five of the worst anti-Western terrorist attacks of the modern era – the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, and the London bombings on July 7, 2005.

We found that more than half of the terrorists had attended college, making them as well-educated as the average American. Two of our sample had doctoral degrees, and two others had begun working toward their doctorates.

None of them had attended a madrassa.

Significantly, we found that, of those who did attend college and/or graduate school, 58% attained scientific or technical degrees. Emwazi/Jihadi John reportedly studied computer programming, which makes him typical of the anti-Western jihadist terrorists we examined.

Of course, large-scale insurgent groups such as ISIS and the Taliban recruit foot soldiers who join the cause to get a paycheck. But the people running these organizations are in it for ideological reasons.

An optimistic view

The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.