It appears only natural to presume that when upper-level Islamic militants take up the cause of their brothers in the underclass, they would do it in much the same way that similar cross-class symbiotic relationships have worked in contemporary Western societies.

Of course they're concerned about political issues and social justice.  But if they're like other members of their species, they're likely to be also getting something on a more personal level from the association:  an acceptable identity.

In the closed business milieu of Islamic societies, where contacts and relationships are everything, the pressure that is put on offspring of successful business and professional people (read, "networkers" and quite possibly also "suckups") to be always proper and capital-N Nice is difficult to imagine.  It must be stultifying.  And if Jerry Rubin considered himself detestably Nice before his drift into radicalism, what on earth must these young people think of themselves?

To make life more difficult, like all affluent people in our media-centric world, they're fed a steady audiovisual diet of the escapades of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis and assorted other blunt-spoken action heroes to inform their unspoken (and therefore powerful) conceptions of what Real Men must be.

Could anything be more seductive to a young man from a background such as this than a chance to get his hands on a Kalashnikov or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher?

Is it any wonder, then that so many members of al Qaeda come from affluent families?