Terrorist attack downtown Manhattan

Beepster

SteveStrummerUK
 
(Terror attacks are) "part and parcel of living in a big city"
    ~ London mayor Sadiq Khan (2016)



The enemy whose name we dare not speak.
 
I despair.
 

Soooo... what's up with the parentheses there? Did he actually say that entire sentence or... yanno.
 
Either way, yes. Living in a city is ridiculously dangerous. Out of all the dangerous crap I went through in the city terrorism was at the absolute bottom of my list of things I was worried about. Like of any kind.
 
Seems to me that if every scary moozlim on the planet was out to kill us all a whole lot more of us would be dead now.
 
It's almost as if it's more about psychotic murderous arseholes than anything else.
 
/is totally racist against murderous arseholes

 
To be honest though, if you live in a major city like Paris, London or NY, it's never far from the back of your mind given how desperate the terrorists are to attack such significant targets and given how active they have been over the last few years. I have a friend on the Cape who is always rolling out the "the terrorists have won if you're afraid" line, but he lives on a perfectly delightful little island with quaint wooden houses, not a seething metropolis that is probably part of at least one extremist's terror plans at any given time. Try taking the subway in New York at rush hour when everyone's squeezed in tight. You're looking around, weighing people up, and (yes) profiling like crazy. It doesn't make your life come to a halt, but anyone who finds themselves in large vulnerable crowds at rush hour in locations which are wildly popular with terrorists is lying if they tell you the thought never crosses their minds. 
 
A few years ago Pew did a major study into attitudes across the Islamic world, and what they found was that support for things like suicide bombings is very widespread. It doesn't really matter that a tiny minority are actual terrorists - this support (moral, religious, financial) is every bit as dangerous. A "tiny minority of extremists" in my mind is a fraction of one percent of the population, 1 in 10,000, something like that. According to Pew, support for these attacks across the Islamic world ranges from 5% - 30% depending on the country. That's not a tiny minority of extremists, that's literally hundreds of millions of people. 

Voda La Void

sharke
 
A few years ago Pew did a major study into attitudes across the Islamic world, and what they found was that support for things like suicide bombings is very widespread. It doesn't really matter that a tiny minority are actual terrorists - this support (moral, religious, financial) is every bit as dangerous. A "tiny minority of extremists" in my mind is a fraction of one percent of the population, 1 in 10,000, something like that. According to Pew, support for these attacks across the Islamic world ranges from 5% - 30% depending on the country. That's not a tiny minority of extremists, that's literally hundreds of millions of people. 

 
One of the things I used to love to do on Facebook was re-write a news story swapping races, religions, events, whatever, and see how folks responded.  I learned the obvious...that people decide about something emotionally, and then search intellectually to justify it.  We tend to work backwards.  This Pew study is a cool one. 
 
Change the context from terrorism to simple racism and watch how flippancy changes to earnest.  If Pew researched and found that 5% to 30% of white folks, depending on which state, were prejudiced against black folks while not acting on it, just simply supporting white supremacy events and news, you will get....an interesting reaction...that won't quite match the dismissive tone of religious extremism.  Yet, racism is not murder.  
 
Don't read too much into this.  I used to argue this stuff all the time before I realized that no one is using logic to guide their conclusions, only to argue them.  I find that kind of fascinating, if not depressing.  I really thought what I believed was logical - but I'm just an emotional hack like everybody else.

 
If there was a concerted effort by a group of white supremacist terrorists to massacre black people in terrorist attacks, and it was found that between 5 and 30% of white people supported these attacks, I can guarantee you that would be a very shocking finding indeed that would trigger an avalanche of outrage and soul searching.
 
Similarly, if you did a survey and found that between 5-30% of Americans supported Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma bombing, it would be a complete shocker which would force everyone to reevaluate their perception of the American public. People saying 5% is not significant - that's nonsense, 5% of a billion is a very significant number, and it's even a significant proportion. 30% is huge. The point is that when you have such large numbers expressing support for terrorism, that's an environment in which extremism will find it easy to spread.