Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

De Vries is doing a careful political two-step: rejecting the seductive, headline-friendly story that terrorism is simply the byproduct of deprivation, while quietly keeping room for governments to talk about poverty without pretending it is a kill switch for violence. The line “no automatic links” is the giveaway. It doesn’t deny that hardship can matter; it denies inevitability. That’s an important rhetorical move in a post-9/11 policy environment where Western leaders often reached for poverty as a morally palatable explanation - and a development-budget solution - to a security crisis they struggled to decode.

The second sentence sharpens the point with a blunt statistic-by-implication: millions are poor; only a few become terrorists. Subtext: if you want to stop terrorism, you can’t outsource the answer to macroeconomics. You have to look at ideology, networks, recruitment pipelines, state failure, grievance entrepreneurship, and the way political identities get weaponized. It also carries a moral defense of the poor, who are too often cast as a potential threat rather than citizens navigating structural constraint.

As a politician, de Vries is also signaling discipline in counterterrorism debate. Poverty is easy to invoke because it flatters the speaker’s compassion and avoids uncomfortable conversations about religion, foreign policy, policing, and radical-right or separatist violence. His framing insists on agency: terrorism is a choice made by a minority, not a natural stage of poverty. That insistence matters because it pushes policy away from paternalistic “fix the poor to fix the bomb” logic and toward targeted prevention that treats violence as organized politics, not social weather.