Terrorism in perspective
Good column from Steve Chapman today asking why there wasn't a deluge of terrorism in the U.S. after 9/11:
It would have been a simple task for a handful of minimally trained volunteers to keep us in a constant state of fear.But the volunteers, with rare exceptions, didn't come forward. Charles Kurzman, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes in Foreign Policy magazine that "approximately a dozen people in the country were convicted in the five years after 9/11 for having links with al-Qaida" and "fewer than 40 Muslim Americans planned or carried out acts of domestic terrorism."
That may sound like a lot, until you remember that there are 15,000 murders a year in this country. A report from the Rand Corp., a national security think tank, noted that of 83 terrorist attacks that took place between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three "were clearly connected with the jihadist cause." Three!
We hear a lot of allegations of radical American imams preaching jihad. If so, they are not getting through. The simple fact is that most American Muslims don't sympathize with religious extremism and almost none are willing to practice it.
None of this argues for complacency - free societies are inherently vulnerable to terrorism - but it is time to put terrorism, and America's obsession with the Greater Middle East, in its proper perspective.
