International terrorism as an optical illusion?
The link below refers to a pdf-file (in dutch).
International Terrorism by prof. dr. Rik Coolsaet and Teun van de Voorde (Gent
University)
Walter Laqueur, author of “Terrorism” (1977) notes in 1985: “�[Historians] will note that presidents and other leaders frequently referred to terrorism as one of the greatest dangers facing mankind. For days and weeks on end, television networks devoted most of their prime-time news to covering terrorist operations. Publicists referred to terrorism as the cancer of the world, growing inexorably until it poisoned and engulfed the society on which it fed. [�] In countless articles and books, our historian will read about the constantly rising number of terrorist attacks. Being a conscientious researcher he will analyse
the statistics, which are bound to increase his confusion, for he will find that more American
civilians were killed in 1974 (22) than in 1984 (16).� (Laqueur, Walter, Reflections on Terrorism. In: Foreign Affairs, Fall 1986, Vol. 65, nr. 1, pp. 86-100)
The years 2002 and 2003 had lowest levels of international terrorattacks (this is without the Israeli attacks for example and without the Beslan-attack because those are considered to be cases of domestic terror attacks) in the last 32 years according to the US State Department statistics and those of the Rand Corporation. It can be compared to the relatively low level of attacks from 1977 to 1980. The number of casualties has been roughly the same during al those years, except for a peak in 2001 (9/11).
For those who can not read Dutch: the first table refers to the number of international terrorist attacks and the second to the best possible trend in those numbers. The third refers to the number of victims and the fourth to the tactics applied by terrorists as does the fifth.
The lower number of attacks and the stable trend in victims might surprise us, it did to me. But note the domestic terrorism like that in Israel or Beslan, does have an impact on our feelings of unsafety, not to mention 9/11 because the statistics also show that 9/11 was something extraordinary. At the same time, more than ever, terrorists are using modern means (tv, internet) to proclaim their message (like the videos on Beslan) and also the media does, this means that we are likely to feel that terrorism has come closer to us.