Nobel winner: Fight poverty to attack terrorism

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Economist Muhammad Yunus accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today for his breakthrough program to lift the poor through tiny loans, saying he hoped the award would inspire "bold initiatives" to eradicate a problem at the root of terrorism.

Yunus, a 66-year-old Bangladeshi, shared the award with his Grameen Bank, which for more than two decades has helped impoverished people start businesses by providing small, usually unsecured loans known as microcredit.

"We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time," Yunus told hundreds of guests at City Hall in Oslo, Norway. "I believe putting resources into improving the lives of poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns."

And

Yunus is the first Nobel winner from Bangladesh, an impoverished South Asian country on the Bay of Bengal. Nobel Committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes said the award was partially intended as an outstretched hand to the Islamic world in an era when Muslims are often demonized because of terrorism.

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I'm not sure, but this may be the first time I've read, heard, or seen this point of view expressed in the mainstream US news media, and it took a Muslim Nobel laureate to point out the obvious. Of course, that's no surprise: it only makes sense that an individual from the Islamic world would have better insight as to why the terrorists "hate us." As for me, I've been saying from almost the beginning that the real reason we have to put up with terrorism is because Western businesses and the governments they control exploit the hell out of the world's weaker nations, treating their peoples and resources as stuff to steal, hoarding the lion's share of their wealth. Ever wonder why we spend so much money on Israel? They're our enforcer over there, continually beating the hell out of their subjugated Palestinian population as surrogates for the rest of the Middle East. You know, to make the oil business function more smoothly.

If we're really interested in ending terrorism, we're going to have to end this big rip off and start using our national power to help the world rather than exploit it. I can't claim credit for this point of view, though. It goes back to at least the mid nineteenth century when Marx was writing, and probably earlier. Heck, by the time socialist playwright Bertolt Brecht was writing in the 1920s and 30s, it had been articulated into art.

Here are the lyrics to Brecht and Kurt Weill's song "What Keeps Mankind Alive" from their musical The Threepenny Opera:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that's where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

Ain't that the truth. Here's a link to a free download of Tom Waits taking it on, quite masterfully--be sure to scroll down to find it.

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