Ernst & Young and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) have issued a report on emerging trends in the financing of terrorism. The central argument of the study is that piracy, smuggling, and counterfeiting have been growth sectors for funding terror, and that India and the world need to establish more mechanisms to combat these methods.
The full report is available here, and a news article about it is here (h/t El Grillo).
There is a lot of value to the report, but one component that readers should take special note of is Ernst & Young’s distinction between the direct expenses for terrorism on things like bombs, materials, and attack plans versus indirect expenses for the bigger picture infrastructure of terrorism: recruitment, gathering intelligence, and public relations. This chart comes from their report:
This is the distinction that Money Jihad has tried to make over the last several months about the Tsarnaev brothers and the Boston marathon bombing. (See here and here.) The attack wasn’t just about the costs of the explosives purchased by Tamerlan, or even his travel expense s to Russia, although that certainly still needs to be explained more thoroughly.
The larger question is the indirect expenses that were made toward jihad in the North Caucasus long before the Tsarnaevs hatched their plot. These were expenditures made over several decades by the Saudis and Western-based Islamic front charities in spreading Salafism through the Caucasus. It took millions of dollars to create and support radical new mosques, fake “relief” programs, to pay and provision Chechen militants and their leaders, to buy loyalties and pay-off ambivalent politicians, and to create a mushroom patch of jihadist websites in the mother tongue of the Tsarnaev family.
It doesn’t do much good for the federal government and banks to scrutinize and report on every single financial transaction that we undertake if, at the same time, we ignore the millions of petrodollars and zakat donations that go toward paying the indirect expenses of terrorism and inculcating the next generation of jihadists.
Zakat funded Russian bombings
April 12, 2010In a good, tough opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Dr. Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation explains how Russian policy toward Islamic terror needs to change. He also states that Northern Caucus jihad is funded by mosques from Dubai and Dearborn.
Posted in News commentary | Tagged Chechnya, Dagestan, Islam, North Caucasus, Russia, zakat | 1 Comment »