clipped from www.douglasfarah.com

As Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post, we are seeing a “international jihadi elite” that resembles international elites of the Bolshevik days who were no more working class than the Tsar. As she notes:
These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven’t emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, “Westernized” parents who sacrificed for their education — though they are often people who, for one reason or another, didn’t “make it,” or didn’t feel comfortable, in their respective societies.

How to counter this is something we should spend much more time on than trying to figure out how to get the average Yemeni to embrace Western liberal democracy.