Maybe Murphy didn’t do this because falling objects are not equivalent to three men ramming and hacking people to death on London Bridge. Terrorists attack not just individuals but society, which makes mortality rates a poor measure of the danger terrorism poses. Falling objects “attack” neither. The men behind the carnage in London appear to have been inspired by ISIS, the same organization that has recently motivated young Muslim men to mow down civilians from Minya to Manchester, Berlin to Baghdad, Istanbul to Orlando, and beyond. Telling people not to be frightened by such acts—that fear is what the terrorists want—does not make those acts less frightening. Many people are scared by terrorism, despite the allegedly comforting statistics, because terrorism is scary. It’s designed to be. And most people recognize that while terrorism takes various forms, one of the most virulent strains these days is extremist violence committed in the name of Islam. They distinguish, in other words, between wobbly furniture and jihadist terror. [...]
Murphy’s reaction to the London attack captures a common line of reasoning, particularly on the left, and it recalls some of the clinical rhetoric that Barack Obama used in similar circumstances. In repeatedly resisting (with some exceptions) any language that associated terrorism with extremist interpretations of Islam, the former president provided fodder to right-wing critics who argued that he was misleading people about the nature of the problem. And in his cerebral approach to counterterrorism, Obama could come across as tone-deaf to the public mood. After attackers killed 130 people in Paris , for example, Obama scoffed at reporters’ questions about whether the bloodshed would change his ISIS strategy. [...]
Obama’s stance on terrorism also contained a contradiction. He argued that the terrorist threat was much less severe than other challenges such as climate change and gun violence. But he didn’t scale back his counterterrorism policies to reflect that assessment. After criticizing the excesses of George W. Bush’s war on terror, Obama launched a massive drone war against suspected terrorists in several countries. He urged the government to do more on gun violence, which is responsible for far more deaths per year in the United States than terrorism is, while simultaneously claiming that the U.S. government was right to “spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil.” Either Obama never managed to invest in counterterrorism at the level he felt it deserved, or he was tacitly acknowledging that terrorism is, in fact, a big problem that statistics only partially capture. [...]
Which is why it’s perplexing that, around the time we spoke, during a visit to Yale Law School, Murphy observed that Americans are more likely to be killed in an elevator accident or by lightning than by terrorism. Why ditch the Saudis and unveil a new Marshall Plan to solve a problem that’s less threatening than lightning?
No comments:
Post a Comment