The Threat Is Already Inside

フォーリンポリシー２本

VOICE
The Threat Is Already Inside
And 9 other truths about terrorism that nobody wants to hear.
BY ROSA BROOKSNOVEMBER 20, 2015

No. 1: We can’t keep the bad guys out.

No. 2: Besides, the threat is already inside.

The 2005 terrorist attacks in London were carried out by British citizens, the Boston Marathon attack was perpetrated by a U.S. citizen and a U.S. permanent resident, and the Paris attacks appear to have been carried out mainly by French citizens. Every country on earth has its angry young men, and the Internet offers a dozen convenient ideologies to justify every kind of resentment. Adding more border guards — or keeping out refugees fleeing war and misery, as too many members of Congress seem eager to do — won’t help when the threat is already inside.


No. 3. More surveillance won’t get rid of terrorism, either.


No. 4. Defeating the Islamic State won’t make terrorism go away.


No. 5. Terrorism still remains a relatively minor threat, statistically speaking.

That’s no consolation to the victims or their loved ones, but it might offer some solace to the rest of us. Those scary statistics you sometimes see about the alleged vast increase in global terrorism include attacks occurring in regions wracked by ongoing armed conflicts, such as Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. According to the 2015 Global Terrorism Index, between 2000 and 2014, only 2.6 percent of victims of terrorism lived in Western countries. Stay away from active war zones, and the average American is far more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist. And gun violence in the United States? I won’t even go there.

No. 6. But don’t relax too much, because things will probably get worse before they get better.


No. 7. Meanwhile, poorly planned Western actions can make things still worse.


So in the wake of the Paris attacks, the fat, happy, over-privileged West wants to turn away the hundreds of thousands of desperate Muslim families seeking shelter and peace, just because a tiny fraction of those refugees might be militants? Islamic militants couldn’t ask for a better recruiting gift.

The same goes for stepping up military action against the Islamic State. If we respond to the Paris attacks by sending a large number of ground combat troops into Syria and Iraq, we once again become foreign occupiers — and big fat targets. If we respond by bombing every IS target we can find, odds are high we’ll end up bombing some people we never wanted or intended to bomb, and this won’t help us make new friends


No. 8. Terrorism is a problem to be managed.

No. 9: To do this, however, we need to move beyond the political posturing that characterizes most public debates about counterterrorism, and instead speak honestly about the costs and benefits of different approaches.


No. 10. We need to stop rewarding terrorism.


The cheapest and easiest way to reduce the benefits of terrorism is to stop overreacting. That 129 people were killed in the Paris attacks is a terrible tragedy and a vicious crime, but 16,000 people in the United States are murdered each year in “ordinary” homicides, 30,000 die in accidental falls, 34,000 die in car crashes, and 39,000 die of accidental poisoning. We should mourn each and every death, and we should take all reasonable steps to prevent more deaths from occurring and punish those responsible for intentionally inflicting harm.


But we need to stop viewing terrorism as unique and aberrational. The more we panic and posture and overreact, the more terrorism we’ll get.

テロは世界中で起きており根絶はできない。すでに監視は強化しており、これ以上監視を強化してもテロリストを摘発できない。情報が多ければ、ノイズも多くなり、選別が難しくなる。爆弾落として、民間人殺したり、難民の受け入れを拒絶すれば、テロリストが増えるだけ。
もっとも、西側にいる限り、テロの被害にあうことは少ない。比較してみても、パリで１２９人が殺害されたが、アメリカでは、毎年、１６０００人殺害されており、３万人が落下で、３万４千人が死亡している。テロの脅威を過大評価してはいけない。

２００５年のロンドンテロ、ボストンマラソンテロ、そして、パリのテロでも、犯人は外からの人間ではなく地元の永住者だったことも銘記しておくべきだ、と。



で、次のも似たような同じ視点



ARGUMENT
Why Abdelhamid Abaaoud Wanted to Die
The battle against the Islamic State will not be won in Raqqa. It’s about giving young men with a death wish a reason to live.
BY IAN BURUMANOVEMBER 18, 2015

Grand causes have always had an appeal to young people: They offer a sense of power, of meaning, a feeling of community, and a means to escape from the frustrations of life. The attraction of the Islamic State’s holy war, promoted on countless websites, through tweets, and other social media, should be easy to understand. Many young admirers of “Carlos the Jackal” also thought they were fighting “the West,” “imperialism,” “fascism,” or whatever else, for the sake of something higher.


The only thing that remains, then, is a long-term strategy to make young people, especially the young sons and daughters of immigrants, less disaffected. This means, as Olivier Roy, a French scholar of Islam, has argued, that Islam in Europe must be domesticated, or “Europeanized,” with the guidance of locally trained Imams, rather than men imported from Turkey or the Middle East. It also means that laws and conditions must be adjusted to make it easier for young people named Ahmed or Fatima to get jobs. It means better integration of minorities in schools.



But even if bombing would help to diminish the power of the Islamic State, the death cult won’t simply vanish. What produces such savage violence in Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, and Paris is a lethal link between ideologies emerging from civil wars in the Middle East and disaffected, or just bored, young people in the West. As long as that link persists, the problem won’t go away.

ニヒルで退屈は若者、ないし、疎外されて、社会でふらついている若者たちが、帝国主義、西洋、あるいは、全体主義との戦い、といった大義を与えられて、テロに走っていくわけだから、こうした若者たちを欧州化し、就職差別を撤廃し、学校でも移民の子供たちをうまくとりこんでいくようにしないといけない、と。