The Terrorist Bogeyman

Here's a question for you: How many people have died in terrorist attacks in the past 4 years?

Give up? I did a little reasearch, and from 9/11/01 to August of this year I came up with the following number: 5500. No, that's not a typo, it's five-thousand-five hunderd. That's worldwide, and it includes the victims of the World Trade Centre. This figure only includes attacks by terrorist organizations like Al-Queda, ETA, etc. Civillian casulties due to military operations such as the Israeli Defence Force, Russian Army, etc. aren't counted.

To put things in perspective, in that bastion of gun violence and murder, Canada, 2400 people have been murdered by normal criminals over the past four years. In the U.S, 40 000 people have been murdered in the past four years. In South Africa, 66 000 people have been murdered in the past four years.

These crime rates are actually lower than they were 10 years ago in all three of the above countries. Given this little nugget of info, how many rights and freedoms are you willing to give up to stamp out murder?

This doesn't mean we should ignore terrorism. Far from it. However, we should take a more realistic approach to counter-terrorism besides assuming there is a terrorist hiding under every rock and around every corner.

9/11 couldn't have been prevented by the military. The only thing they could have done is shoot down the planes. Innocent people would still have died, Afghanistan still would have been invaded, and there'd still have been a congressional investigation about 9/11.

Simple procedures and policies, and maybe an observant airline employee are the only thing that could have prevented 9/11.