Gwynne Dyer: Terror threatens stability

Columnist·Whanganui Chronicle·

31 Aug, 2017 08:00 PM4 mins to read

Peace message: A woman holds a banner reading in Spanish: "I am Muslim and Catalan, not a terrorist. Islam is Peace", during an August 19 protest by the Muslim community to condemn the vehicle attacks in Barcelona the previous week. Muslims in the hometown of suspects arrested over last week's attacks in Spain expressed their condolences to the victims. Photo/AP

London in March: five dead. Stockholm in April: another five dead. Manchester in May: 22 dead. London again in June, this time on London Bridge: eight dead. Barcelona in August: 14 dead. Five mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Europe in six months, and all but one (Manchester) carried out using rental trucks. Is it safe to go to Europe any more?

No, of course not. It isn't safe to live anywhere. You can get killed by a vehicle driven by a non-terrorist, or by falling down the stairs, or even by drowning in the bath. Indeed, you are far more likely to die from any of those causes than from terrorist attacks, no matter where you live in the world. But, in those other cases, your death will not be "news".

The only part of the world where Islamist terrorism really is a serious threat to people's lives is the greater Middle East (including Pakistan). There is a kind of civil war between modernisers and cultural conservatives going on in many Muslim-majority countries, and the terrorist threat to ordinary citizens' lives is 10 or 20 times higher than it is in the West. But even there it is far smaller than it looks.

What makes the "terrorist threat" look big in the West is the natural human tendency to be fascinated by violence. The mass media know their audience, and they cannot resist catering to this appetite: that's why thousands of fictional characters die violently on television and in movies every week.

Violence in real life is even more interesting - especially if there is some possibility, however remote, that it might affect the viewer. So the media reflexively, instinctively inflate the threat, and to people who don't understand statistics (i.e. almost everybody), terrorism starts to look like a very big deal.

There is no way to avoid this without imposing official controls on media coverage, and it's not worth paying that price, so we'll just have to live with the media hype. We will also have to live with the terrorism itself, even though it's generally considered to be political suicide to say this in public.

After all, it's obvious that we're not going to run out of Islamist extremists any time soon, and that the security services cannot prevent wannabe terrorists from getting their hands on trucks or vans (or knives). So there will probably be lots more low-tech terrorist attacks over the next decade.

Don't panic. The entire European Union has lost just 62 killed in terrorist attacks so far this year, which is about one person in every eight million. The loss ratio is even lower in the United States: 11 killed in four terrorist attacks so far this year. Four times as many Americans are killed every day in ordinary murders.

So the right response to low-tech terrorism in every Western country is to keep calm and carry on, even knowing that the attacks will probably continue until the present generation of jihadis ages out. Generational turn-over is what really ends most ideological fashions.

In the meantime, the priority is not to turn against Muslim communities in the West - because it's wrong to blame millions of people for the actions of a few hundred gullible, attention-seeking young men, but also because that's exactly what the Islamic State propagandists want people in the West to do.

Ten or 15 years ago, Islamist attacks on Western countries had a specific strategic goal: to lure the West into invading Muslim countries, thereby radicalising the local populations and driving them into the arms of the Islamists. The ultimate goal of those extremists was to gain power in their own countries, not to "bring the West to its knees" or some such drivel.

That game is pretty much played out now: the Islamists cannot hope to sucker the West into doing any more large-scale invasions. So why carry on encouraging terrorist attacks in the West?

Because it's dirt cheap, it promotes the brand, and it might, if they get lucky, cause huge internal conflicts in Western countries with large Muslim populations. So far, to the immense credit of both the majority communities and the Muslim minorities themselves, this has not come to pass.