Posted on 07/03/2007 5:19:12 AM PDT by Loyal Buckeye
As terrorists go, last week's attacks featured The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. One of the would-be London bombers drove erratically down Haymarket St. -- presumably affected by the fumes from the gas cylinders and gasoline containers that were the heart of his makeshift car-bomb -- before crashing into a garbage bin, getting out and running away. Another parked his explosives-packed car illegally, so it was towed away. The third attack was at Glasgow airport on the following day, but nobody was hurt except one of the attackers, who set himself on fire.
More-competent terrorists might have killed dozens of people, but it's safe to say that this incident will be taken more seriously in the United States than it is in Britain or anywhere else in Europe. An occasional terrorist attack is one of the costs of doing business in the modern world. You just have to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, as people in Europe do in general.
Most major European countries already had been through some sort of terrorist crisis well before the current fashion for "Islamist" terrorism: the IRA in Britain, the OAS in France, ETA in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Red Brigades and their neofascist counterparts in Italy. Most European cities also were heavily bombed in a real war within living memory, which definitely puts terrorist attacks into a less-impressive category. So most Europeans do not obsess about terrorist attacks. They know that they are likelier to win the lottery than to be hurt by terrorists.
Russians also are pretty cool about the occasional terrorist attacks linked to the war in Chechnya, and Indians are positively heroic in their refusal (most of the time) to be panicked by terrorist attacks that have taken more lives in India than all the attacks in the West since terrorist techniques first became widespread in the 1960s. In almost all of these countries, despite the efforts of some governments to persuade the population that terrorism is an existential threat of enormous size, the vast majority of the people don't believe it.
Whereas in the United States, most people do believe it. A majority of Americans finally have figured out that the invasion of Iraq really had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but they certainly have not understood that terrorism itself is only a minor threat. "We have a threat out there like we've never faced before," said actor, former senator and potential presidential candidate Fred Thompson last month. "I don't think the (American people) realize that this has been something that's been going on for a few hundred years, and our enemies have another 100-year plan," Thompson continued. "Whether it's Madrid, whether it's London, whether it's places that most people have never heard of, they're methodically going around trying to undermine our allies and attack people in conventional ways, while they try to develop nonconventional ways, and get their hands on a nuclear capability, and ultimately to see a mushroom cloud over an American city."
There has been only one major terrorist attack in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and that one, on 9/11, is almost six years in the past. So how have Americans been persuaded that their duty and their destiny in the 21st century is to lead the world in a titanic, globe-spanning "long war" against terrorism?
Inexperience is one reason: American cities never have been bombed in war, so Americans have no standard of comparison that would shrink terrorism to its true importance in the scale of threats that face any modern society. But the other is relentless official propaganda: the Bush administration has built its whole brand around the "war on terror" since 2001, so the threat must continue to be seen as huge and universal.
Ridiculous as it sounds to outsiders, Americans regularly are told that their survival as a free society depends on beating the "terrorists." They should treat those who say such things as fools or deliberate liars, but they don't. So the manipulators of public opinion in the White House and the more-compliant sectors of the U.S. media will give bigger play to the British bombings-that-weren't than Britain's own government and media have, and they will get away with it.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Russians also are pretty cool about the occasional terrorist attacks..."
Chalk up one writer for Edwards.
I wonder if the Press would be so flippant had it succeeded.
The answer is yes.
You KNOW that if we had another attack, it wouldn’t be “business as usual” as they claim, but “WHY DID BUSH LET THIS HAPPEN!!!???”
Btw, this is the new meme that the left has agreed on spreading around. You can find it at several left wing blogs recently if you look for it.
Basically belittle any threat that terrorists pose, and even present terrorists as kind of a bumbling, harmless three stooges act.
“An occasional terrorist attack is one of the costs of doing business in the modern world. You just have to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, as people in Europe do in general.”
Better put some ice on that.
Perhaps if one sets off a car bomb outside Edwards’ office, or home, then we can judge how unwaivering his assessment on terrorism as a “cost of doing business” remains.
Poor Gwynne doesn’t seem to understand the concept that an incompetent terrorist can kill you just as dead as a competent terrorist, it may just take him more attempts to get it right.
Clueless.
Of course, unless it was at a night club frequented by the MSM players. Of course they would get over it.
The terrorists were quite competent and all of their devices should have worked as designed.
However, the cellphone service didn't support the mission.
There can now be no doubt that the only way you can get good cellphone service in Central London is to be inside or very nearly inside a building. This is a sign that the Brits have installed devices throughout the area that suppress cellphone signals from the Cell to the handset.
Their airports seem to be equally well-guarded with this new technology.
There have been 3 terrorist attacks since '93 in the US and numerous ones toward the Us. This person is a clueless moron, or does she have an agenda.
What does she think started the Chechnya war???
And what exactly does she think the “cost of doing business” was in New York on September 11, 2001?
One of these days a a city is going to go up in a flash of light - then what you do you imbecile?
It's just a bumper sticker.
Yeah, they deal with it by taking it in the shorts like a new guy in prison general population.
I have been thinking the same thing. That's probably why the poor ignorant, helpless, little freedom fighters set the car on fire at Glasgow, and didn't rely on a cell phone.
I reccomend saving this little gem and pulling it out the next time the blood of many innocent Americans is shed by terrorists and e-mailing it back to this self-absorbed leftist.
Apparently, after the murder of 3,000 people on 9/11 America wasn’t as cool about it as the Russians are. I guess we have a lot to learn about being cool from leftists like this guy, huh?
I got so excited I skipped a word...
“- then what will you do you imbecile?” is what it was supposed to say...
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