Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday drew a link between extremism and lack of opportunity in the Middle East, telling students in the region that suicide bombers are driven by a feeling they have more to gain in the afterlife than now.

The former president hushed a packed basketball stadium at the American University in Dubai when he asked, rhetorically: "What leads people to suicide bombing?"

Answering his own question, Clinton said: "They believe they have more to gain in the next world than this one."

"They believe that change is not possible through reasoned, common efforts," he continued. "They believe that, absent some cataclysmic and destructive event, that tomorrow is going to be just like yesterday."

That feeling, he said, is the "major danger" confronting Palestinians and Israelis today.

"If we keep going on where the Palestinians are absolutely convinced that tomorrow is going to be just like yesterday, it can have calamitous consequences not just for them, but for all the rest of you as well," he said.

Clinton's comments came as his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, was elsewhere in the region defending the U.S. stance toward Israeli settlement to worried Arab allies.

After meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, the secretary of state told reporters that Washington does not accept the legitimacy of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Continued...