If truth is the first
casualty of war, common sense is the first victim of terrorism.
There are no better
examples than the hyper-ventilated assertions which followed the recent bombings
in Brussels. France’s President Hollande declared that ‘all of Europe has been
hit’. UK Prime Minister David Cameron warned that his country faced ‘a very
real threat’. Here, Malcolm Turnbull ticked off the Europeans for their sloppy
security. Prominent journalist Greg Sheridan, channelling Donald Trump’s
absurdity that ‘Belgium and France are literally disintegrating’, wrote that
the attacks represented a ‘damn [sic] burst’ which left the ‘structures of the world
… trembling’.
If we didn’t know better
we might easily mistake messrs Hollande, Cameron, Turnbull and Sheridan and
regrettably many others as Isis recruiting agents. Their comments are a dream
for the organisation’s propagandists. Worse, they paint a picture of the threat
from Isis that is not borne out by the reality.
Isis terror threatens
individual safety. Does it really threaten the security of
European or Western states more broadly? There is a vital difference between
the two ‘s’ words. Isis is a truly appalling outfit which commits heinous
deeds. It has around 30,000 fighters and controls large tracts in Iraq and
Syria. But without a navy, without an air force, how exactly does that
translate into threat potent enough to make ‘the world’ tremble?
Fortunately, there is still
wise counsel to be had. President Obama’s 2016 State-of-the-Union address should be required reading for all those prone to
excitability:
… over-the-top
claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of
fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments
or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they
do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell;
that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.
Some of the best
commentary on Brussels came from The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins.
The political and media over-reaction, he wrote, ‘converted a squalid
psychopathological act into a warrior-evoking, population-terrifying,
policy-changing event’. It also illuminated an appalling double-standard given
that the ‘atrocities in Brussels happen almost daily on the streets of Baghdad,
Aleppo and Damascus’.
For Americans, and quite possibly many others in
the ‘trembling’ West, household furniture poses at least as great a danger as
terrorism. Micah Zenko
from the reputable Council on
Foreign Relations has written that in the decade after 9/11 an average of 29
Americans were killed each year in terrorist attacks. Figures compiled by the US
Consumer Product Safety Commission showed that about the same number were
crushed to death each year by unstable television sets and furniture.
Unwelcome
news for the hyper-ventilators; important perspective for everyone else.
