On September 19, 2001, writing in the Hyde Park Herald Barack Obama attributed 9/11 related terrorism to, “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”

Even more so, Obama went on to say:

“They see poverty all around them and they are angry by that poverty. They may be suffering under oppressive and corrupt regimes and that kind of environment is a breeding ground for fanaticism and hatred.”

“It’s absolutely critical that the U.S. is engaged in policies and strategies that will give those young people and these countries hope and make it in their self-interest to participate and create modern, open societies like we have in the U.S.”

Obama has, in fact, held to this position for the better part of a decade despite the evidence that the 9/11 attackers were, in fact, mostly rich kids.

In his Cairo speech, Barack Obama did not directly mention “poverty,” but instead went with the white man’s burden — an indirect way of saying the same thing — pontificating that “tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.”

Contra Obama, it turns out that yet again, the Al Qaeda terrorist who tried to blow up a Delta jet on Christmas Day was another rich kid.

With his wealth, privilege and education at one of Britain’s leading universities, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab had the world at his feet – able to choose from a range of futures in which to make his mark on the world. . . .

Abdulmutallab, 23, had lived a gilded life, and, for the three years he studied in London, he stayed in a £2m flat. He was from a very different background to many of the other al-Qa’ida recruits who opt for martyrdom.

It may be easier for an academic wrapped up in post-modern liberal syllogisms to draw inescapable conclusions from the absence of facts than to embrace simpler themes based on the presence of fact, but we can always hope and pray Obama learns something from this.

Some people want to kill us. They need to be rooted out and killed first. And we should perhaps consider that the “War on Terror” we are no longer allowed to refer to continues even if we choose not to participate.

Oh, and given that the “poverty” stereotype has yet again been disrupted by a terrorist who did not fit Barack Obama’s fact pattern for terror, maybe Obama should consider that “no one has ever broken out of a SuperMax” and “let’s try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City” also are the products of post-modern liberal syllogisms derived from the absence of actual facts. And do we really want to keep releasing GTMO detainees to places like Somaliland that do not even technically exist?