Last year, Business Pundit blog published a list of their top 10 wealthiest terrorists. We don’t think the entire list was accurate but there were a few Jihadis listed who are worth mentioning here…
The wealth of these monsters flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that poverty drives people to Jihad…
Osama
bin Laden was not only one of the world’s best known terrorists; he was
also one of the richest. A member of a powerful and wealthy Saudi
family, he inherited a vast fortune. After 9/11 brought him to
international attention and made him a household name, his personal
fortune was estimated to be $300 million, although this assessment was
later downgraded to a comparatively paltry $50 million. Whether it is
$300 million or $50 million or somewhere in between, it’s certainly
enough money to live on.
Despite
being a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Yasser Arafat was the founder and
leader of Fatah, an organization which joined with the Palestinian
Liberation Organization in 1967. The PLO was identified by the US as a
terrorist group in 1987 and again in 2004, and by the Israeli government
until 1991. Member organizations of the PLO committed such heinous acts
as bombing school buses and assassinating Israeli athletes at the
Olympics. In 2002, the Israeli Military’s Chief of Intelligence alleged
that Arafat had a net worth of over $1.3 billion (with some US sources
suggesting it could be as high as $3 billion). Much of that personal
fortune is alleged to have been taken directly from funds that were
intended to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people.
On
25 December 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a flight in
Amsterdam bound for Detroit with plastic explosives in his underwear.
The explosives failed to detonate and he was apprehended by authorities.
The failed underwear bomber came from one of the wealthiest families in
Nigeria, where his father was chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria.
When studying in University College London he resided in a pricey £4
million ($7 million) apartment, a far cry from normal student digs.
Thankfully he never thought to use his family money to pay someone to
teach him how to use explosives properly.
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