Terrorism: It's Time to Get a Grip

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on September 11, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/41444/

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror." -- FDR, 1933

American public policy shouldn't be made by 19 reactionary right-wing fundamentalists with box-cutters or some Saudi culture warrior holed up in a cave in Pakistan, and it shouldn't be based on the public's basest emotional responses. But for the past five years that's largely been the case.

Of course, that assumes that sound policy, based on realistic analyses of the issues, is lawmakers' primary goal. It's not; that would only be in the interests of ordinary people. Terrorism has become intensely politicized, and fear is now an organizing principle for the Right.

Last week, journalist Mathew Stannard wrote about a new study by researchers at Columbia University that showed empirically what many of us have long known intuitively: The Bush administration hypes the threat of terrorism, the media embrace that hype, President Bush's approval ratings rise and the cable news channels get their ratings.

University of California scholar Mark Juergensmeyer told Stannard: "This public panic benefits the terrorists whose work is made easier by an overactive government response that magnifies their efforts. In an odd way this puts the government and the terrorists in league with one another," he said. "The main loser, alas, is the terrified public."

Aside from the political consequences of a freaked-out populace, the constant drumbeat of fear has been used to justify the detention of U.S. and foreign citizens without trial, warrant-less surveillance of Americans and an unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign state that has proved to be disastrous. It's also been used to justify the greatest expansion of military spending since the start of the Cold War, paid for with large deficits and deep cuts in domestic priorities.

For all of those reasons, we have to put the threat of international terrorism in perspective. That doesn't mean denying that Islamist terror is a real threat -- it certainly is -- but it does mean evaluating how great that threat is, and questioning whether the strategies that the U.S. has adopted to counter it are the appropriate ones.

With that, here are some things you should know to put international terrorism in the proper perspective.

More...