The selling of terror

terror / construction
Young Fogey, in a comment to my previous post about the ridiculous overreaction of world media to a very small scale explosion in an irrelevant Athenian suburb, alerted me to this excellent article from Spiked-online, on the aggressive overselling of the "terrorist threat" worldwide. This part especially is worth quoting and is telling (if true):

While fantasy terrorism booms, real terrorism seems to be on the decline. After Madrid, Europe's capitals were all expecting that they would be next - but it is more likely that Madrid was the exception rather than the rule. A recent US State Department report into patterns of global terrorism found that terrorist attacks are at their lowest ebb for years. There were 190 in 2003, compared to 440 in 1995 and 665 in 1987. Moreover, the bulk of the attacks over the past five years occurred in Latin America and Asia, rather than North America or Western Europe. In the main, terrorist attacks tend to be sporadic, and are carried out by small isolated groups to varying degrees of success (8)...

...The gap between the fantasy and reality of terrorism becomes more glaring by the day. It seems that Western elites are generating the terrorist threat for themselves - if terrorism stopped altogether, the alerts and arrests could happily rumble on. After all, why should a few facts get in the way of a good war?"

As I said, excellent article, though I'm somewhat weary of the source....