The False Fear Issue - Terrorism

The Republicans have been using the boogeyman of islamic terrorism to scare Americans into voting for them for years now. We now know, and Tom Ridge (former Secretary of Homeland Security) has admitted, that the Bush administration falsely raised the terrorism alert to help their re-election effort. And today's Republicans still want you to believe that islamic terrorists (like those pictured above) pose a real and significant risk to most American citizens.

They are lying. The truth is that an American stands a much better chance of dying from nearly any other reason, rather than a terrorist attack. Here are some of the odds of you (or any other American) dying from a terrorist attack:

– You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack.
– You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack.
— You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane.
— You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack.
–You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack.
— You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack.
– You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack.
–You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack.
–You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.
–You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.
–You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack.
– You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack.

Add to this the chance of being attacked by islamic terrorists are much, much lower than being attacked by home-grown white right-wing terrorists. The government knows this, but right-wing Republicans have prevented then from making it widely known. They don't want voters to know that their own supporters (at least the more extreme ones) pose a greater danger to the lives of Americans than islamic terrorists pose. Here is a bit of truth from Steve Coll at The New Yorker:

In partnership with a team of researchers at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Policy, some of my colleagues at the New America Foundation collated and analyzed three hundred and two cases of domestic terrorism during the decade after the September 11th attacks. The numbers do not correspond with the public’s fear or understanding.

The entire decade-long domestic death toll from terrorism (that is, where a political or ideological motive was apparent) was thirty. By comparison, the rate of annual deaths from mass shootings by non-ideological deranged killers—such as the gunman who attacked moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, last month—runs more than thirty times higher (on average, about a hundred deaths each year). In all, there are about fifteen thousand murders in America each year.

Of the three hundred domestic-terrorism cases studied, about a quarter arose from anti-government extremists, white supremacists, or terrorists animated by bias against another religion. And all of the most frightening cases—involving chemical, biological, and radiological materials—arose from right-wing extremists or anarchists. None arose from Islamist militancy.

I'm not trying to say that terrorism, even islamic terrorism, poses no danger at all -- only that the danger is so small as to be insignificant. Don't let the Republicans inflate this issue and fill you with an unwarranted fear, just to get you to vote for them. This election should be about the economy and jobs, and the Republican's still cling to their "trickle-down" theory -- which has been shown to be an abysmal failure. That's why they want to scare you. It's all they have.