When we think of terrorism, we’re told to think of immigrants to our country who are just looking for a better life, and are disenfranchised by our system.
However, we’ve found an interesting correlation between terrorists and their families and the welfare system. The Boston bomber’s family, the Tsarnaevs, received over $100,000 in government welfare.
They’re not the only ones either:
Zacarias Moussaoui, the French North African charged with conspiracy in connection with the 9/11 attack, became an Islamic radical living in London “while drawing welfare benefits and studying economics,” Newsday reports.
Ahmed Ressam, the member of Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group who was arrested crossing the U.S. border with bombs designed to blow up L.A.’s airport, moved to Canada in 1994 where he “survived on welfare payments” and petty crime, according to terrorism expert Peter Bergen.
Metin Kaplan, who heads a German radical Islamist sect suspected of attempting to fly a plane into the Ataturk mausoleum in Turkey, “claimed social [welfare] benefits in Cologne for many years until 2m Deutschmarks ($1.2m) in cash was found in his flat,” reports the BBC.
Abu Qatada, the cleric who taught Moussaoui and is accused of having links to al-Qaida agents in six countries, avoided extradition to Jordan on terrorism charges by settling in England, where “[l]ike many other London-based Arab dissidents, [he] has received regular welfare checks from the British government—and government subsidized housing,” according to the Washington Post. Abu Qatada’s welfare payments were stopped when it was discovered he controlled a secret bank account containing approximately $270,000.
How can these people turn out to hate the countries which have provided them with so much?
It has to do with the psychology of the welfare system:
Meanwhile, relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe. Without government subsidies, they would have to overcome the prejudice against them and integrate into the mainstream working culture. Work, in this sense, is anti-terrorist medicine.
It seems like there’s a new story on this every day.
[A] couple of ethnic Nigerians butchered a British soldier with meat cleavers in broad daylight on a bustling street in a London suburb, then boasted about the murder in video interviews with bystanders.
These weren’t just random terrorists either. These were students at Greenwich University, let into the UK under their more-liberal-than-the-US immigration laws. They were even under watch by MI5, which means nothing now that they’ve committed a crime.
[L]ast week, immigrants, mostly Muslims, began rioting in peaceful Sweden — burning schools to the ground, torching cars and throwing rocks at the police.
This is Sweden, a country which has perhaps the world’s most open-door immigration policy and comprehensive welfare system., where the population has been rocked by attacks from cradle-to-grave welfare immigrants.
The connection between terrorism and welfare is therefore not just an American problem and seems to become stronger based upon the strength of the country’s welfare system. It’s apparently more difficult to bite the hand that feeds you when you live in a country that doesn’t feed you much—you just wouldn’t go there.
By the way, speaking of monsters receiving welfare, did you know that Ariel Castro, who kidnapped three young girls in his basement and raped them for 10 years, was on unemployment benefits? It’s a little-mentioned fact. In fact, it would be interesting to find out the number of those who committed a serious crime while on welfare.
So how do we start trimming back this bloated program?
In 1996, the Welfare Reform Act was passed, in order to raise the necessary limits to receive welfare. It was heralded as a move to save the government millions and allow many to start moving away from the welfare system.
However, in 2009, the fledgling Obama administration began diligently taking welfare reform apart, piece by piece. Legal justifications for subverting the law were drawn up, allowing the following:
[allow] HHS secretary to waive work and other requirements for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) that were part of the 1996 welfare reform law. Last summer the Obama administration issued an Information Memorandum allowing states apply to waive the TANF work requirement.
Essentially, this was a move done to try and skirt the law, passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton.
No states have applied to waive the requirement, so this move was done for one reason: to punch holes in a wildly successful law, and eventually raise the number of people on welfare.
Remember, this is already a cumbersome, poorly-managed system, where even the dead get benefits.
In Massachusetts, an audit “identified 1,164 cases in which welfare recipients continued to receive benefits from six to 27 months after they had died. These dead individuals received $2.39 million in total.”
If a business was found to be hemorrhaging $2.39 million, the board of directors and entire leadership would be immediately fired. But this is the government—where nobody gets fired, even for the grossest of incompetence.
It goes to show that welfare has far outgrown its purpose as a safety net for society’s most needy. Collecting it has now become an alternate form of employment, and payouts in the billions show no sign of slowing under the current administration. How much more money must be taken from those who work to feed those who won’t?
