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The New World Disorder
International terrorism is booming, but Americans seldom pay the price.
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By any definition, the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, this week was an act of terror, no less so than Ku Klux Klan lynchings throughout the South in decades past. Yet without minimizing the act’s tragedy, horror, or broader social implications, it’s worth noting that—compared with the rest of the world—terrorism in America, or terrorism affecting Americans, is a rare occurrence.
On Friday the State Department released the latest edition of its annual Country Reports on Terrorism. In 2014, according to its findings, 32,700 people were killed in terrorist attacks—of whom just 24 were American citizens.
Those 24 Americans were overseas at the time—10 in Afghanistan, five in Israel, four in Syria, three in Somalia, and one each in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. In this sense, the report loads the deck: a congressionally mandated document, it calls on the secretary of state to detail attacks in each “foreign country whose territory is being used as a sanctuary for terrorists or terrorist organizations.” (Italics added.) In other words, domestic acts of terror are excluded, along with the can of worms that the whole concept would stir up.
Still, go ahead and count every domestic hate crime that fits the State Department’s definition of terrorism in general—“premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets,” which certainly includes the killings in Charleston, among many others—and the total would pale before what’s going on in those parts of the world where this sort of violence defines daily life.
[center]
[/center]
By any definition, the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, this week was an act of terror, no less so than Ku Klux Klan lynchings throughout the South in decades past. Yet without minimizing the act’s tragedy, horror, or broader social implications, it’s worth noting that—compared with the rest of the world—terrorism in America, or terrorism affecting Americans, is a rare occurrence.
On Friday the State Department released the latest edition of its annual Country Reports on Terrorism. In 2014, according to its findings, 32,700 people were killed in terrorist attacks—of whom just 24 were American citizens.
Those 24 Americans were overseas at the time—10 in Afghanistan, five in Israel, four in Syria, three in Somalia, and one each in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. In this sense, the report loads the deck: a congressionally mandated document, it calls on the secretary of state to detail attacks in each “foreign country whose territory is being used as a sanctuary for terrorists or terrorist organizations.” (Italics added.) In other words, domestic acts of terror are excluded, along with the can of worms that the whole concept would stir up.
Still, go ahead and count every domestic hate crime that fits the State Department’s definition of terrorism in general—“premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets,” which certainly includes the killings in Charleston, among many others—and the total would pale before what’s going on in those parts of the world where this sort of violence defines daily life.
Source.
