What risk does terrorism pose to people living in the West? It may not be something you often consciously deliberate, but American physicist Lawrence Krauss has argued that the danger is not nearly as large as many perceive it. Crunching the numbers, Krauss noted that if you were living in Paris on the same day the Bataclan theatre was attacked, you had a roughly 1 in 20,000 chance of dying. That might sound alarming, but it’s about the same odds as dying in a car accident in France every year.
No one would deny that 130 people is an enormous number to lose their lives on a single day, of course, but Krauss reflected that it only raised Paris’s annual murder rate to around the same levels as New York City, and New York is generally considered to be a very safe city to live in by Americans. He went on to say that around 30,000 people die every year from gunshot wounds in the U.S., which is around 400,000 people since 9/11. The death toll from domestic terrorism since 9/11 is just 54, however. Krauss failed to mention that two-thirds of the 30,000 annual gunshot deaths are suicides, but the figure remains heavily lop-sided against terrorism even if you correct for that.
Krauss isn’t the only one to cite statistics as a reason for adjusting our thinking about terrorism. CNN’s Dean Obeidallah has noted that despite widespread fears connecting Muslims with terrorism, less than two per cent of all terrorist attacks in Europe between 2009 and 2013 were committed by religious extremists. When you examine the Europol TE-SAT reports this claim is based upon you’ll find that the figure is actually less than one per cent, but he was close enough.
Photo credit: The British Prime Minister’s Office.
So if religious extremists only commit a tiny fraction of Europe’s terrorist attacks, who carries out the most? According to Europol data, ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorists do, with 78 per cent of all failed, foiled, or completed attacks attributed to them. And in the U.S.? Obeidallah pointed to an analysis of an FBI terrorism report indicating that 94 per cent of all domestic terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2005 were committed by non-Muslims.
According to Pew Research Center data, the number one concern for people in the West isn’t climate change or global economic instability, but ISIS. It seems that many people not only overestimate the threat of terrorism, they over-assign the source of that threat to Muslims.
That we’re not amazing at aligning our fears with statistical realities shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. After all, people who are afraid of commercial air travel despite its excellent safety record are evidence enough of that. Still, while statistics can be useful for helping undermine people’s overinflated fears, they can also be misleading or irrelevant.
Take the statement that less than two percent of terrorist events in Europe between 2009 and 2013 were religiously inspired. While strictly true in light of the Europol reports, it’s not clear that it is something worth focusing on. After all, European laws may mean that ploughing over a field of GM crops is counted in reports as an act of terrorism just the same as blowing up a crowded subway. Because of this, a more sensible way to gauge the threat posed by different kinds of terrorism would be to look at the total number of deaths attributed to them.
If we do that, we’ll find that religious extremists tend to be far more deadly with their terrorism than environmental extremists or separatists. Europol data shows that between 2009 and 2013 separatist terrorists killed 12 people and religious terrorists killed 14. However, because separatists carried out 758 attacks in that time and religious extremists carried out just 12, religious extremists were orders of magnitude more lethal on a per attack basis.
This raises a second problem, and that is that concentrating on a five year window of time between 2009 and 2013 in Europe, as Obeidallah does, has the unfortunate effect of missing out a lot of modern religious terrorism. Most obviously, it misses the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191, the 2005 London bus and subway bombings that killed 52, and the attacks in Paris last year that killed 130. If you include the death tolls from those attacks in your figures, a rather different picture emerges about the kind of problem that religious terrorism represents.
Finally, it is worth noticing that there is something that none of the statistics above capture, and that is the potential of terrorism to inflict massive suffering and loss. If ISIS commanders could press a red button tomorrow and detonate a dirty bomb in the heart of New York City, for example, you can bet your last dollar they would.
Why? Because the fundamental limitation on terrorism when it comes to groups like ISIS is not some residual core of moral decency on their part, but their present inability to do it on the most widespread and catastrophic scales. If we want to see the full reality of the problem, we should at least consider this fact.
For that reason, a warning: statistics are a valuable part of the global conversation on terrorism and should have been a more prominent feature of it a long time before now. However, be cautious that the conclusions they are rallied in support of are in fact well-supported. After all, not every number used to allay fears or undermine prejudice in the context of terrorism is relevant or accurate.
Timothy Rowe is a philosopher and writer. His website is here, and you can catch him on Twitter at @_TimothyRowe.