Fear of terrorism clouds the reality
Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counterterrorism director, said it is difficult to understand why people become terrorists, whether their cause is religious or political.
“There’s all these different factors involved: poor integration, poor education, discrimination, a difficult neighborhood, the need to be part of a group or to have a sense of purpose,” he said.
“What we do know is that extremists want to conduct many more small-scale attacks and that the Islamic State wants to show that the organization is still strong,” de Kerchove said. “We have foiled a lot of plots. There will be more.”
Although random attacks understandably cause great public alarm, research shows that the chances of being killed by a terrorist in Western Europe are extremely slim compared with terrorist hot spots in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria and Pakistan, according to PeaceTech Lab/Esri Story Maps.
More than 100,000 people have been killed in terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Africa since 1970, about a third of the global total. In Europe, the figure is at least 6,400.
In 2016, Western Europeans were 85 times more likely to die of a heat wave than from terrorism, 50 times more likely to die in a biking or watersports accident and 39 times more likely to be killed by consuming a toxic product. They were 433 times more likely to die of suicide and 32 times more likely to die by homicide.
“Our societies in North America and Western Europe have managed over the course of the last century to reduce the risks of a wide range of factors commonly associated with death,” said Robert Muggah, a security specialist and co-founder of the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think tank that computed the probability findings. “We know earthquakes and floods kill far more people than terrorism, but we give a huge amount of attention to terrorism even when it involves small numbers of casualties. It whips our society, which is a low-risk society, into a kind of frenzy and augments the perceived risk.
“Treating some of these events as crime events, which is ultimately what they are ... would be a much more effective response.”
“Treating some of these events as crime events, which is ultimately what they are ... would be a much more effective response.”
Robert Muggah, security specialist