A little welcome perspective on the threat of terrorism
by digby
After a somewhat shrill Cycle segment on the terrorist threat ‘o the day (hordes of ISIS fighters coming home to kill you in your beds) Toure asked a good question. He pointed out that the common response from the military and police was kind of like playing whack-a-mole and wondered if there were more systemic responses than just “fighting the terrorists.” Daniel Benjamin, the counter-terrorism expert they were interviewing prefaced his comments with this:
“Let’s be clear, the total number of deaths from terrorism in recent years has been extremely small in the West. And the threat over the past few years has been considerably reduced. Given all the headlines people don’t have that perception but if you look at the statistics that is the case.”
Here’s a graph of political violence in Europe over the past several years just to illustrate. You can see that the mass killings in Spain and Britain a decade ago were the worst of the Islamic terrorist attacks. And the Norwegian right wingnut attack was right up there.
All such violence is awful and scary. In Europe they don’t have a lot of daily mass violence like we do here in the US so it’s probably even more horrifying for them than for us. But we really need to fight to keep this in perspective before we go off the deep end again like we did after 9/11. Opportunists use these events to pursue an agenda and they aren’t all Islamic extremists. Some are radicals of another kind. We need to fight the urge to see this as an existential threat when it clearly isn’t, at least not for us. (It’s other Muslims who are facing the more serious threat.)
Opportunists like John Boehner, who said this today:
Boehner: We live in a dangerous country and we are reminded every week of the dangers that are out there and we got reminded of that by what happened in Paris just a week ago.I’m going to say it one more time because you’re going to hear about over and over again in the months to come as we attempt to reauthorize the FISA program. Our government does not spy on Americans unless there are Americans that are doing things that frankly tip off our law enforcement officials to an imminent threat.
He got one thing right. We do live in a dangerous country. But it’s quite a bit of misdirection to say that the most dangerous threat any of us face is from Islamic terrorism:
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