The Truth:
Comparing the number of people killed by terrorists to the number killed in accidents involving items that are otherwise benign - say, bathtubs or furniture - is a strategy to mitigate concern about Islam. The argument
is that since we don't fear these "more deadly" objects, then it is irrational
to fear "less deadly" Islamic terror.
The critical assumption
is that danger and risk are measured by number of people
killed.
Let's test the soundness of this logic by applying it to bathtubs and alligators.
In the United States, about 300 people
are killed accidently each year in a bathtub, usually by hitting their head or drowning.
In the same period, on average, only one person dies from an alligator attack. According to the "it's a phobia" argument,
alligators must be significantly less dangerous than
bathtubs.
Of course, no one seriously believes that bathing in an alligator pond is safer than
using a bathtub. When they actually do think about it, no one seriously believes
that a bathtub is more dangerous than a terrorist either, even though terrorists
kill fewer people (in the West, at least). This is because the number of
casualties does not necessarily correspond to the severity of a threat - nor
what our response should be.
Untold billions of
dollars and the lives of thousands of security personnel are spent each year to protect the world from Islamic terrorists. This means the number of terror victims is not an apples-to-apples comparison to bathtubs and lightning strikes. Most people know that much of the planet would be killed off
if these religious extremists were left free to pursue their stated ambitions.
Even the
people who peddle the numbers game do not seriously think that a terrorist in the home would be safer
than a bathtub or refrigerator, which proves that their simplistic point is meaningless.
Moreover, how much stock do these 'intellectuals' put in the numbers game when they claim that "Islamophobia" is a great problem than Islamic terror? To our
knowledge, only one Muslim in America lost their life to anti-Muslim bigotry in the fifteen
years following 9/11, while
there were close to 100 Islamic
terror plots and 150 kills. In Western Europe,
there were more than 200
Islamist attacks and over 1100 killed against perhaps a dozen deadly hate crimes targeted toward Muslims.*
|
