Bérubé is just wrong
When he says terrorism isn’t taken seriously enough by some of us here on
the left:
Now, it?s one thing to ridicule the color-coded terror alerts and Tom Ridge?s special sales on duct tape. That ridicule is entirely appropriate, especially when you take into account the very curious timing of those orange alerts. It?s quite another thing to say, as Ed Herman did in December 2001, ?the idea that the Taliban is a fascist and expansionist threat, and that Islamic fundamentalism more broadly speaking is the same, doesn?t hold water.? Remarks like these suggest that one wing of the American left just doesn?t take Islamic fundamentalism or al-Qaeda very seriously, and they (that is, the remarks and the people who?ve made them) have now become the source of both Paul Berman?s and Peter Beinart?s analogies between what they see as the naive, trusting fools who were soft on Communism in 1947 and the naive, trusting fools who are soft on Islamism today.
The worst terrorist attacks on US soil, the September 11 2001 attacks that started this whole mess, killed less than 3,000 people, some 2996 according to the September 11 victims site.
To put this into context, more people drowned by accident that year (3,281), died as a result of a fall or slip (2,570 “falls on the same level” + 564 slips); 6,071 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents and 3,021 people died as a result of medical or surgical complications. And those aren’t even the big killers.
Quite simply, terrorism is a law enforcement issue. It is only a threat to our society or way of life if we let it. That’s what Michael Moore means when he said terrorist threat. The best an organisation like Al Queda could do, with four fuel heavy planes and all the luck in the world was kill about as many people as drown by accident in a given year in the United States.
Of course the main impact of terrorism is psychological; the September 11 attacks did shatter America’s feeling of invincibility, as the murder of Pim Fortuyn did the Netherlands’, but as countries like the UK with their experience in dealing with IRA terrorism make clear, you can live with terrorism.
Terrorism need not be the one all defining issue of contemporary politics, but it was made into this by governments eager to grap more power by playing into our fears. We on the left should not be accomplishes in this.